


Inheriting Love

by Fictropes



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Death Mentions due to Dan's job, M/M, Strangers to Lovers, rom-com time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:14:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29292714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fictropes/pseuds/Fictropes
Summary: Dan lives and works in a small village where everyone knows everyone. A place where everything is typical, until Phil comes along.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 100
Kudos: 163





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ermmm i have no excuse for the weirdness that is this fic aprt from erm..... i'm not done writing rom-coms and.... i'm british x

Dan’s office is just on the outskirts of a village he doesn’t want to live in. It’s filled with old people who judge him, young people who judge him, but at least no parents who judge him. He’s not cut out for small town living, for existing in a place with people who know everyone. When they’d realised he was gay it became a whole thing, the local newsagent started ordering in gay magazines just for him. He’s bought every single one just because he feels guilty about it, because he’s the only gay in the village and the idea of them getting piled up on the top shelf and gathering dust is weirdly terrifying. 

It’s a small office. A quaint little thing that barely holds everything he needs to work but relocating is too much of a pain and he’s settled—even if he likes to pretend he’s not. He’s got a nice view from his window, a field filled with various forms of farm life depending on the day. Sometimes he’ll look out and see horses, sometimes there’s cows that come too close to his window in a way that’s mildly threatening. Dan’s favourite days are the days there’s lambs, and sometimes he’ll even go outside on his lunch break and pat them through the fence. 

So his office isn’t really an office, because offices are not built next to farms, but it is a building that can pretend to be an office. He’s made it so by shoving a desk in there, some filing cabinets that are mainly filled with gay magazines. The carpeted floor offends him, and the walls have literal wallpaper on them which he thought had been made illegal after the 1980’s. But it’s home, and the rent is cheap enough that he doesn’t quite crash and burn after paying it each month. So he stays year after year, proceeds to do the saddest job on earth every single day. 

When he’d gone into law he’d never expected theend result to be so death related. Reading out, and executing wills, had never been Dan’s idea of a fun time. He’d had big goals of arguing in court rooms, solving the crimes of the century, but then he’d realised that involved more self-confidence than he possessed. Now he watches family’s argue on the daily, watches them realise maybe they weren’t as important in that persons life as they thought. People come into his office expecting to walk away with an entire house, but they leave with a fancy hat and some cutlery from the 1800’s. 

He doesn’t hate his job, he’d say it’s not his life-long dream but he doesn’t really have one of those anymore. Once upon a time he thought acting was the thing for him, but then he’d flopped one audition and decided to never, ever again try. And that’s probably his problem, he doesn’t live by the philosophy of _if at first you don’t succeed, then try and try again_. More by _if at first you don’t succeed, then never try again and instead lay awake thinking about the embarrassment for at least nine years._

Today isn’t a big day. Today he has one person coming in from somewhere that isn’t here. Dan thinks he said London on the phone, and he’d immediately started fantasising about living there. He’d been so deep in his own thoughts he’d forgotten to listen to the guys name, ended the call with a hazarded guess that, by the little response of a noise, hadn’t been correct. Which means they’re already on bad footing, which means the meeting is going to be a train-wreck and his entire day is going to be shit because it’s not even lambs in the field day. 

Dan goes through all the necessary business of preparingthe will, and it helps that’s there’s only one named beneficiary because at least now he knows he’s expecting a Phil. 

Phil sounds sort of like an old persons name, and that’s why he lets out a silent gasp when the actual Phil walks in through the door. Because the actual Phil is making him wish there were two gays in the village, the other being, well, Phil. He’s all tall and pretty and wrapped in a grey t-shirt that fits him far too well. It’s not fair, Dan thinks, that someone like him can exist. Just walk about freely, as opposed to walking around holding Dan’s hand. 

He’s long past the point of trying to pretend he doesn’t go a bit insane over someone who’s his type. He used to try and rein in his thoughts, but now he lets them go wild because it’s the only fun he has. As long as Dan doesn’t say any of them out loud, then everything is fine and good. 

“Erm—hi?” Phil says, giving a wave that’s not quite a wave. “Am I at the right place? It’s just, there’s a cow right there.”

Dan turns to the left, and is jump-scared by something he’d literally just been warned about. 

“Christ. Yeah.” He turns slowly, trying to keep the cow in his peripheral vision. He’s got these fears about one trying to head butt through the window one day, steal his lunch of a sad sandwich and curly-wurly. “Right place. That’s just Betty.”

“Is it?”

“No.” Dan admits. “I actually have no idea, but Betty sort of sounds like a cow name, so.”

“I dunno.” Phil shrugs, and he’s still hovering in the door like he thinks he might have the wrong place and Dan’s just lonely enough to lie. “I think Daisy.”

“Yeah.” Dan agrees, a slow nod as he really considers this new contender. “That could work. I’m imaging the cow in a hat now though like in that movie.”

“I— sorry, who’s died? I don’t think anyone I know has actually died.” 

Dan’s startled by the sudden question, forgot a little bit what he’s actually here to do. Talk about the death of a family member, not name random animals in a field. He shuffles through the papers, trying to find the connection and he really should’ve been more on top of things. It’s just people usually know who’s died, so he’d started taking everything for granted. 

After two minutes of frantically, but trying to not look frantic, searching he finally finds the sheet of paper he was looking for. 

“Betty.”

“The... cow?” Dan looks up to Phil who looks a bit wide-eyed, all deer in the headlights. Which is fair enough, because it does look like Dan’s announced a cows death as his reason for being here. 

“No, but how fun would that be?” Dan asks, then immediately wishes he could go back in time by five seconds because they’re talking about the death of a literal person here. Because he’s supposed to be a professional. Because— it’s alright, because Phil is laughing. 

“What do you think a cow would leave?” Phil finally joins him in the actual room, fingers caressing over the back of the chair opposite rather than sitting on it. Dan gets caught up in the movement, suddenly he wishes he was a chair as opposed to whatever his body is up to right now. 

“Milk?” 

“And grass.”

“Milk and grass.” Dan agrees, and maybe today won’t be quite as bad as he’d originally expected. As long as he can go another thirty minutes without saying something weird, or offensive, he might just survive.

“But actually?”

“Oh!” Dan laughs, because he’d forgotten about the job part of his job again. Usually he’s quite good at this, can act solemn—serious— like he’s a nearly thirty year old man instead of multiple children in a trench coat. He’s been doing it for years and never had any complaints, but throw in a pretty man and, apparently, all of Dan’s professionalism goes out the window. 

“Your great-aunt, it says here.” He slides the paper across the table, taps at the name at the top with the end of his pen. “Recognise her at all?”

“No.” Phil frowns, stares at it intensely—like that’ll help. 

“Oh, well, that happens from time to time. Maybe she was close to you when you were a child, but then something happened that meant you lost touch. Families fall out, don’t they? That sort of stuff.” Dan explains, and he once again sounds like he’d only just stepped in the role. Just this morning read a book entitled _how to handle death for dummies_ , whilst he shovelled a bowl of fizzy sweets into his mouth in lieu of an actual breakfast. 

“I’ll have to ask my mum.” 

“I can give you some time, if you want to make a phone call?”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll do it later. Won’t change anything right now, will it? Unless she’s in it?” Phil asks, trying to read the piece of paper but his glasses are half way down his nose and he’s choosing to squint rather than to just push them up. 

“Nope, just you.” Dan slides the paper back across to his side, reads it for him both out of pity and the fact that it’s part of the job-role. “She’s left you everything on her estate, including a house right in the middle of the village.”

“A house?” Phil asks, sounding alarmed. “I don’t want a house.”

“You don’t have to keep the house. Most people chose to sell it on.” Dan says, and he finally feels like he’s doing his job for the first time today. “If that’s what you want to do. There are a few options.”

“I feel bad. _Oh, hi, aunt that I never saw thanks for the house but I hate it, I’m going to sell it._ ” Phil sits, with a thud of—probably death related real estate distress. “What if she haunts me?”

“I don’t think she’s going to haunt you.” Dan reassures, and now he’s definitely back in the ballpark of _not_ doing his job. He’s never had to tell anyone before that their relatives aren’t going to haunt them, so at least it’s a new skill. “She’d want you to do what feels right for you, that’s why she left everything in your name.”

“Might be a trick.” 

Dan nods, because he doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t know this Betty enough to say it’s not a trick, but then he also doesn’t believe in ghosts—it’s a fifty fifty. He should probably explain to Phil now that’s he’s not an exorcist, just incase he asks later. 

“I don’t think it’s a trick.” Dan’s trying so hard to be soft, to put on his best tone of comfort. He can’t work out if he just sounds condensing. “I’m sure she gave you all this for a good reason, maybe if you go look at the house you’ll find out why.” 

Phil freaks out a bit then, like he hadn’t realised the concept of owning a house meant actually going inside of it. He taps long fingers against the table, all this fear in his blue eyes. Dan half wants to reach out and pat his cheek, tell him everything will be alright—that’d be weird though. He needs to maintain some semblance of professionalism, and physically comforting a client is crossing about a thousand lines. It’s just—Phil looks so sad. 

“You’ll come with me?” Phil blurts. 

“Will I?” Dan asks, quick raise of the eyebrow accompanying the words. “What if the ghosts see me as an outsider and get me?”

“Don’t even joke.” Phil whines, and he sounds so genuinely petrified that Dan lays off and puts him out of his misery. 

“I’ll come with you, I’m the one with the keys.” He wheels back in his computer chair, pretends not to see Phil staring at his legs in action. If he sees that then he’ll start thinking he’s being checked out, which probably isn’t the case because Phil’s probably grieving—just a little bit. 

“What if there are ghosts?”

“Then they’re your ghosts.” Dan explains, calmly. “If you inherit the house, then you inherit everything in it.” He finds the keys dumped in the back of one of his drawers, behind some of the gay magazines. Maybe he should hire someone to come clean the place up, put an actual system to the chaos. “A-ha! There they are.”

“Is it nice?” Phil asks, seeming reluctant to get up out of the chair now he’s in it. Now he knows what getting up means. “If you, like, know the area.”

“The area is nice, can’t say I know the individual house. It’s a small village filled with old people, it’ll probably be a nice little house. Bungalow, maybe.” Dan takes the keys out the little white envelope and dumps them on the desk between him and Phil. “There we go, you can take them just after you sign the papers.”

Phil signs the papers, but it does take a little bit of prompting and a lot of reassurance that this isn’t a trick. Also that nothing bad is going to happen to him as a result. Dan’s never had someone so unwilling to accept free real estate before. Phil is properly superstitious about things Dan never even knew were superstitions. When he starts talking about how coats being hung over the back of kitchen chairs mean something evil is going to happen, Dan starts to think Phil is just making everything up. 

“That’s not a thing!” Dan laughs. “Are you thinking of—no, I don’t know. New shoes on the table?” 

“It’s a thing! I heard it. If we walk in there and she’s left a coat on the back of a chair, we have to leave.” Phil says, and he sounds deadly serious about it. The look on his face is so intense that it honestly—it’s oddly a turn on. 

“Alright, alright. Should we also leave if there’s toilet roll in the bathroom? Soap near the sink?” 

Phil just rolls his eyes, like Dan’s the one being unreasonable here. “Here. Signature. Keys.”

“Thank you.” Dan takes this part seriously, folds it all up and neatly files it away in the one drawer that isn’t a complete disaster. Signatures are important, signatures are things that can land him in court if he’s not careful—once upon a time he was _not_ careful. “You drive here?”

Phil laughs, and Dan doesn’t get the joke. 

“Oh, no. I can’t drive.” Phil clarifies once he sees the look on Dan’s face. “I mean, I can drive… have a licence. But you wouldn’t really want to me to drive, I’m very bad.” 

“Ok.” Dan nods, doesn’t want to to dig too deep into that. He deals with enough death, doesn’t want to fill his day with hearing about car crashes on top of it. “Then I’ll drive us there. It’s a bit of a walk from here. It’s right in the middle of town.” 

“I don’t like walking.” 

“It’s alright, if you want to. If you’ve planned it.” 

“Who plans a walk?”

“Lots of people, I think.”

Phil pulls a face.

“Not you then?” Dan laughs, standing up and walking over to the small coat-rack in the corner of the room. He shrugs on his coat, puts on his scarf, fiddles with the gloves in his pocket before deciding against them. It’s that weird sort of weather where it looks cold, but it’s actually fake. You wrap up all nice and warm and end up a sweaty mess after five minutes. He doesn’t want Phil to look at him and see sweaty mess. 

“No. I planned a run once, nearly hacked up a lung.” Phil is still sitting, but when he sees Dan start to bounce on the spot he gets the hint, leaves the home he’s made from himself on the other desk chair. Dan takes a small amount of pleasure in the fact he’s a couple of inches taller, but then he wishes he wasn't because Phil will probably assume that makes him the ghost fighter out of both of them. He’s never had a fight in his life, if someone so much as looks at him the wrong way he wants to cry. 

“I run. Sometimes. Less than I probably should.” It’d worked, a bit, when he had. His therapist had been right about the whole moving your body thing. But it was easier in the summer because trying to convince yourself to go out in the dark, in the rain, is hard. Sometimes he lies about it, tells her he’s been going at least four times a week. She sees right through him, Dan’s sure of it. 

“Long legs.” 

“Yeah?” 

“For running.” 

“I mean, your legs are seventy-five percent of your body, I dunno what point you're trying to make.” Dan decides on the gloves, just because he feels awkward standing here doing nothing. The minute they actually step outside he regrets it—one of those tricksy days. 

“They are quite long, but they’re also quite like noodles. Running is hard with noodle legs, I think.” Phil strays, goes straight towards the field as opposed to Dan’s car. Today is fluffy cow day, so Dan can’t really blame him. They’re the whole reason he’d finally decided to commit to being a vegan. 

“Your house isn’t this field.” Dan joins him, elbows resting on the wood as he watches the cows graze. There are a few perks to living here, one of them being it’s incredibly peaceful. The whole reason he’d moved here in the first place was to get away from all the loud, but then he’d found himself missing the distraction of background noise. 

“I wish it was.” Phil crouches down, stares through the gaps in the fence for no reason at all. He’s getting more of a view of udder now—maybe that’s his thing. “How do I convince them to come over here?”

“Moo, maybe.” And it’s a joke, a complete and utter joke, but he should've known better. Should've known Phil would be the type of person to do just that. He wants to be embarrassed for him, but it’s honestly so utterly charming that all Dan can do is crouch down beside him and join in. 

It works. 

“Cows!” Phil grins, absolutely delighted by their new closeness. 

“They never usually come this close when I’m actually outside, they like to stand close to my window thought. As you know.” Dan’s trying to stay at a lower level than Phil, not quite scream at the animals, alert the farmer to their weird lurking. But he’s still a bit excited, still wouldn't mind reaching out and patting at their heads. “They’re cute.” 

Phil has no chill. He shoots to his feet and he’s all hands, all big gestures and leaning over the wood to try and get that little bit closer. His shirt rides up, and the back of one of his trainers slips from his foot, but that doesn’t deter him. Dan stares, a bit. Firstly he wonders how there’s someone else on planet earth paler than him, secondly he wonders how someone can be so fit. 

Dan reaches out eventually, once Phil has fully somehow become the cows friend. They may as well be sat legged on the ground having a picnic together, and it’s alarming that Dan can imagine Phil being the sort of guy to shove a fistful of grass in his mouth—no questions asked. He removes his gloves and the fur is soft beneath his fingertips, he really wishes he’d have tried this sooner. A fluffy cow is cheaper than therapy.

“I want one.” Phil sounds a bit whiny. “Why couldn’t I be left cows? I could have a cow live in my house.” 

“I think they need a big field.”

“Then I’d get a big field.” Phil shrugs—no big deal. “London has big fields somewhere. Probably.” 

“For a million-bajillion pounds maybe.” Dan gives a final pat, vows to come out here at least once a week for whatever this is—happiness in the form ginger fluff. “Come on, we should go look at this house. I’ve got someone coming in a bit later.” And that’s a lie, but Phil doesn’t need to know that.

“Fine, but I want to come back later and say bye.” 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

The house honestly might have ghosts, maybe Dan spoke to soon. His initial thought is the person who gave Phil this house actually hated him. There’s a boarded up window on the left, a door that looks like it’s made out of metal, overgrown front garden filled with stingy nettles and a drain pipe that’s half on the house and half not. But maybe it’s just the outside, maybe the inside is charming. The rain can be really bad here, the outside has just taken a battering that resulted in peeling paint and—general evil. 

He can’t believe he’s never seen it during his years living here, mind wildly throwing out thoughts that it hadn’t actually existed before today. Phil came and he brought the house along with him. Surely the local council would’ve said something about it, as stuck up their own arses as they are. 

“It’s haunted.” Phil declares. 

“I can’t even argue.” Dan shuffles closer, through a wooden gate that ominously creaks as he pushes it open. Maybe there’s a cryptid living amongst all the weeds, ready to bite at their ankles or drag them both off to it’s lair. “Maybe it’s just an old building? Inside could be, like, normal.”

“Your voice says you don’t believe that.” Phil’s closer than Dan had expected, practically glued to his side. It’s nice in a way that can only be nice to someone who’s completely touch starved. “Why do I get punished? What did I ever do to her?”

“Jesus.” Dan jumps, clings onto Phil’s elbow a little too tightly when he notices the doll staring at him from the right window. “If you wanted to bring me for protection, you chose the wrong person.”

And now they’re both just stood clinging my at each other on the garden path, terrified of the unknown but just as terrified by the _known_. A house with creepy doll doesn’t spell out good things. It spells out bad evil things, spells out getting murdered by the spirit of a Victorian child. They _could_ sell the house without even technically going inside it. 

“It’s so creepy.” Phil whispers, but even then he’s the one to push forward. To finally get them to the front door. “But what if there’s treasure inside? What if she was a pirate, or just someone who went into shops and stole cool stuff?”

“Then you’d be arrested for being associated with crime.” Dan says. 

“I would?” Phil squeaks, looking paler than ever. 

“No.”

“Oh—you. Shutup.” Phil’s gets a little punchy then, smalls digs to the top of Dan’s arm. “You’re mean. I’m paying you for this.”

“You’re literally not paying me.” Dan laughs, sidestepping to remove himself from the line of fire— Phil’s fists of fury. 

“Oh, well. Shutup anyway.” He forgets about his revenge mission, instead starts digging through his insane amount of pockets for the the keys. “Do you have a will? Might need it after going in here.”

The keys are huge, filled with key-rings from all over the world. They’re either the sign of a person well-travelled, or someone who simply had a lot of friends. Both options are nice. Phil’s hands shake as he puts the key in the lock, and it takes a laughable amount of time to actually open the door because there are actually about nine keys in total. It’s the last key they use, because of course it is. But the whole ordeal takes away some of the tension, some of the fear of what they might find. 

“Now I wanna know what all the keys are for.” Phil shoves them back into his pocket, and Dan has no doubt that he’ll—impossibly somehow—struggle to find them again when they need to lock up. 

“We can find out, I’m sure, if you want to spend about ten years in this place.” 

The door opens, slams up against the hallway wall and—bad. It’s just as bad on the inside as it is the outside. Dan thinks there’s a blood splatter on the wall, but he really doesn’t want to think about that. It’s probably just tomato sauce, Phil’s aunt probably had a lot of food fights with her various cross-country friends. 

“Smells.”

“Yeah.” Dan agrees, nose wrinkling as it hits him full force. “God. What is that?” 

“Erm—dunno, fish?” Phil asks, making no move to go past the doorstep. Dan doesn’t blame him, the last thing he wants to do is actually go inside but, for some reason, he’d made a promise. Dan already knows if Phil goes inside, that he’ll follow behind. 

“I think so, yeah. Nice.” 

“So—I guess, we go in?” 

The light doesn’t work, no matter how many times Dan hits the switch. The sun is still up but somehow the entire house seems to be pitch black. The torches from their iPhones just give everything an eery glow, seem to highlight all the dust and mysterious stains. But it’s weird, because once they get past the hallway everything is—fine. Everything else is perfectly normal, or at least just base-level old house flaws. 

The light switch works in the living room. The furniture looks normal. The carpet is questionable—as most carpet is—but there aren’t any maybe blood stains on it. The hallway of death was just a one off, maybe to ward off visitors. 

“I don’t get it.” Phil says, and Dan can’t help but agree. He’d expected the entire house to follow the pattern, but now he feels like he’s walked through a door and into a parallel dimension. “Why the murder hallway? This is just like—old lady stuff in here.”

There are lace doilies, also there’s a lot of mustard coloured furniture—too much some might say. The curtains are floral, and the doll sat in front of them is still a bit ominous but not quite as much as it once was. The smell that lingered is also gone. Dan’s got to be dreaming, but apparently you only dream about people you’ve seen before, and he’d definitely have remembered seeing Phil. 

Dan lets out a little noise when something runs past his feet, he doesn’t want to look down because he already knows what he’ll see. Mice are alright as long as they don’t personally bother him, stay in their little holes in the wall looking like cartoons. When they’re climbing over the trainers he shouldn’t really be wearing to work, then he gets a bit aggy about them. 

“What?” Phil spins around, and the concern on his face is almost too much for Dan to cope with. No one looks at him like that anymore, like they give a shit. “You aright?”

“Yeah.” Dan breathes out, once he can speak again. “Mouse.” 

“Oh!” Phil’s reaction is the complete opposite, he looks pleased by it. “I want a mouse.” 

“You’ve technically inherited a mouse, if you can catch it.” Dan props himself up against the door frame, leaves Phil to explore. He keeps picking things up and then getting distracted, putting them back in the wrong place. Not that there’s a right place anymore, this all now belongs to Phil who can decide to do whatever he wants with, well, everything. 

Phil doesn’t fit in, doesn’t look like he belongs in such a place. Everything is muted and dull, but Phil is so fucking bright he’s almost blinding. He stands out against all the darkness, but it somehow works. Somehow he breathes life into it all. 

“Do you think everywhere is so filled with… stuff?” Phil asks, opening a drawer and then immediately slamming it back shut. It is a bit of a that _sort_ of house, you just know anything that can be filled with things is absolutely going to be filled with things. All the space utilised, no minimalism to be found. Dan hates that his thoughts go to Phil having to stick around for a bit, to sort through it all. 

He’s letting his mind wander too much, but that’s just because Phil is nice. Might even be because Phil is so shiny and new, he’s so used to everyone else in the village that maybe anyone would cause this reaction. But Dan doesn’t even quite believe that, Phil is pretty and good and _charming_. That’s why he’s going a little wild on imagining Phil moving into the village, biking past Dan’s house every morning with a fresh loaf in his little bike basket. 

“I am going to say one hundred percent yeah. There’s probably stuff in places you wouldn’t even imagine there could be stuff.” He stops his lurking, helps Phil out by opening up some more drawers just to see. 

“I have to sort through everything before I can sell it, right?” Phil asks, and when Dan looks up at him he’s wearing a weird hat. 

“Just find that?” Dan laughs, and he can’t help but go over and adjust it. “There now it’s actually on properly it suits you.” 

“You’re just being nice.” Phil goes cross-eyed as he tries to look up at himself. “My head is too oddly shaped to ever have a hat be its friend.” 

“Na.” Dan shakes his head. “I’m saying that this one suits you.” 

Phil blushes, just a bit. Dan tries to convince himself it’s a figment of his imagination, but the colour sits so obvious—so well— on his cheeks that it’s undeniably real. He doesn’t think about it too much, apart from it’s probably all he’ll think about for the rest of the day. 

“Well—your scarf suits you.”

“Thanks.” Dan laughs. “But do they actually really suit anyone?”

“Yes.” Phil says, tugging at the material around Dan’s neck. “They do.” 

And now they’re both just stood in the living room, blushing like a pair of idiots. 

“Anyway.” Dan claps his hands, regrets it instantly. “You can’t sell it with all the stuff, I don’t think.”

“Thought not.” Phil frowns, steps away from Dan and out of the moment. “Do you—you busy?” 

“Right now?”

“Always.” Phil says. “I mean, like, do you have free time this week?” 

“My diary isn’t exactly packed.” Dan crouches down, starts opening up the sideboard cupboards. It’s filled with books, and it looks an awful lot like his filing cabinet but with fancy queer literature instead of just raunchy magazines. “Gay cupboard.”

“What?” Phil asks, moving quicker than Dan’s seen him move since he got here. Then he’s down by Dan’s side, fingers stroking along the spines of books Dan wants to read one day. Maybe Phil will let him have them, if he asks nicely. “God. Do you think she gave me everything because I’m the only other gay person in my family?” 

Dan lets his heart go wild this time. 

“Good reason.” Dan murmurs, trying to act like he’s not been giving a handful of hope. 

“Do you wanna help me out? I can pay, obviously. If you’ve not got a lot of appointments.” 

“Sorry, what?”

“Like—help me clear this place out, get it ready to sell.”

“Oh.” Dan’s face is definitely doing something, and now he’s the one going cross-eyed trying to see exactly what. “I—yeah, I could do that.”

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

As promised, Phil does come back and say goodbye to the cows. He lingers near the fence until they come back close. It honestly doesn’t take that long, Phil doesn’t even have to moo this time, they just seem to instinctively trust him.

“You’re going to have to buy a lot of boxes, and a lot more bin-bags.” They’d stuck around for an hour or so, going room to room to assess the work. Everyone room seemingly had more than the last. It was—interesting. The stuff. It looked like the treasure Phil had been fantasising about.

“I’m good at deciding what to throw away, got loads of practise when I moved the other year.” Phil’s trying to put the hat he’d taken from the house onto the cow closest, and for some reason the cow is letting it happen. Dan can’t let the moment slip, scrambles for his phone so he can take a photo of it. If Phil’s in the frame too, then that’s not a problem at all.

“I say I am, but I get all guilty. Like I think fucking everything has feelings, can’t throw away inanimate objects incase I make them sad.” Dan’s probably revealing too much there, but he doesn’t mind. Phil doesn’t seem like one to judge.

“I’m like that with teddies, if I wake up in the middle of the night and see one on the floor I feel like the worst parent.”

“Ugh, don’t.” Dan giggles. “Toy story related trauma. That movie fucked me up.” 

“I used to line all my toys up every night as a kid and say goodnight to them one by one, like I was taking a register.” Phil says, taking the hat back and popping it back on his own head. It’s wonky again, and Dan really can’t help himself. His hands are doing whatever they want today, already fixing it for Phil.

“There.” Dan smiles. “Suits you again.”

Phil rolls his eyes, but the red is back and sat on his cheekbones. “Train is due in half an hour. I’ll see you next week?”

“Yeah. See you next week. Just pop in and I’ll— we’ll go sort out everything.”

“Ok.” Phil puffs out his cheeks, and if Dan were braver maybe he’d press his fingers into them. “Big job."

“Huge.” Dan agrees. “Go get some sleep, you’ll need it.”

“I always get sleep, don’t need a reason to do it.” Phil hops down from where he’s been balanced on the bottom part of the fence. “I need to really go, but I love the cows so much. Promise me they’ll still be here next week?”

“They’ll be here next week.” Dan says, but then he remembers that might be a lie. “Unless—some days it’s lambs instead, or horses. It’s like a rotation of cute animals.”

“Oh.” Phil gasps, and Dan would swear his eyes go all sparkly. “So, what you’re saying, is I have to come every day?”

“If you want to get the full cute animal experience, yeah.”

“Then maybe I’ll see you every day next week.” Phil says, and Dan can only hope.


	2. Chapter 2

Phil bursts through the office door just under a week later, out of breath and red in the face. He doubles over in an attempt to compose himself, but the giddy glee on his face never vanishes. Dan doesn’t know what to make of it, until he looks to his left and sees a new type of field day entirely. Shetland ponies, a few of them, being tiny and unreasonably cute. 

“They’re—oh, we have to go bother them animals.” Dan spins in his chair, alternating between Phil and the ponies until he feels almost sick with the constant motion. He just doesn’t know what he wants to look at more. 

“We do. I saw them and ran all the way up the road, and you know I told you about— god. About not running.” Phil gets out, but it seems like an effort—all huffing and panting. “I’ve got such a bad stitch, how’d you get rid of them?” 

“Push, I think.” And Phil does push, but not in the way Dan had meant. It’s more in a way that makes it look likes he’s trying to have a bowel movement. Dan’s teetering on the edge of hysterics, but the idea of this going any further is a bit scary. 

“No, no, no. I meant use your fingers, push into where it hurts.” Dan amends, glad when Phil stops straining and instead presses all of his fingers into the spot just below his rib cage. 

“You have to be more specific, I’m not a runner. I don’t know what you mean.” Phil says and he’s trying to justify it all, but Dan’s started laughing and now he can’t stop. 

“I didn’t mean shit it out!” Dan screeches the words because it’s the only way to get them out, only way to cut through his own too loud laugh. 

“I wasn’t going to, I was—being pregnant. You push when you’re pregnant.” Phil’s arguing, but it’s so entirely nonsensical that Dan can’t even argue back. Maybe this is how his courtroom career would’ve gone, stood amongst all the serious people in white wigs unable to form a response.

“Sorry for interrupting you, please go back to giving birth.” 

“Did you think they came out of somewhere weird as a kid?” Phil asks, and now he’s removing his coat even though it’s the middle of December and it’s so cold in the office that Dan can see his own breath.  It’s an old building, the noisy radiators don’t work unless you’re practically sat on top of them. Dan’s taken to wearing all his outerwear inside, dives to take it off when he hears a car pull up outside, or a client opening the main door. 

“Like your belly button?” Dan is sort of paying attention, but it’s more to Phil’s arms than to his words. They’re not going to win any prizes in the worlds strongest man, probably won’t be able to pick up those huge fuck off boulders, but they’re still—good. Good arms. Might be able to pick Dan up, or at least hold him. 

“Or your butthole.”

“Oh.” It shocks a laugh out of Dan, but he really should’ve at least half expected it. “That’d hurt, I think.”

“I think it hurts the way it’s actually done.” 

“I think it definitely does.”

Dan’s not being professional, but that’s not a surprise. Phil knocks all the professional out of him. He’s not in the habit of going outside to play petting zoo with his clients, not in the habit of going above and beyond and helping them clear out their house.  He’s good with contracts, with taxes, with helping people sell up but that’s usually as far as it goes. To look forward to spending time with someone who he should be being professional around is new, and he can’t quite tell yet if it’s going to get him into a heap of trouble. He’s his own boss, but he still has to abide by some rules. He still has to treat this with a certain amount of fragility—with care. 

This is all new, this is all probably too much but he can’t back out of it. He doesn’t want to. He wants to spend all his time in a haunted house sorting through possessions that aren’t his own. He’s just going to have to make sure he doesn’t put his actual work on the back-burner, give everyone who comes to him the attention he should be giving. He can help Phil, but he can’t let Phil distract him from everything else. 

“I didn’t bring bags.” Phil doesn’t want to seem to sit down, because sitting down means not going outside. “Is there a place we can stop and grab some?” 

Dan nods, but he doesn’t want to. Going into a shop means people knowing, means questions. Dan’s known for being a tad bit of a loner, never has anyone around, lives alone, eats alone in the cafe on the days he’s too lazy to make lunch. Inviting Phil into his world may not seem major, but Phil doesn’t live in a tiny village where wearing the wrong sort of shoe can invite gossip. 

“And boxes?”

“Maybe just the bags for today.” Dan suggests. “We can have a couple trips of just getting rid of the actual rubbish, so we have more room to work.” 

“And we’ll put sticky notes on the things we want to keep?”

“Do you have sticky notes?”

“No.”

“Well.” Dan laughs. “Then I suppose we’re buying bin bags and sticky notes.” 

He wants to start writing a list, just for something to do, but two items doesn’t constitute an entire a4 sheet of paper. Dan just wants to stop so obviously staring at Phil, or so obviously trying to _not_ stare at Phil. The trouble with living here is that Dan doesn’t see many people who equal his type, so when they do come along he gets a bit stupid. There’s exactly 0 people within a five mile radius on Grindr, which means his job has become his own sort of bad dating app. Phil’s the first viable person to pop up on the homepage. 

“Can we also buy food? I didn’t have any breakfast.” Phil pats at his stomach and, seemingly on queue, it lets out a pitiful growl. It prompts Dan to dig through his backpack, hand Phil a slightly squashed Mars bar. 

“Just for now, so you don’t faint on me. There’s a chippy on the corner of the houses street, we can run in in an hour when it’s closer to lunch time?” The chippy is the best place to go because the woman running it just doesn’t care about anything, the most Dan has ever gotten out of her is a grunted _it’s snowing._

“Oooo, yeah.” Phil nods, tearing the wrapper open with his teeth. “I want a sausage.” 

“Do you now?” 

“A battered one, covered in grease.” Phil says. And it’s not better, but it’s also not any worse. 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

Phil will not let them leave without visiting the ponies, which Dan is glad about because he really wanted to see them. He was just trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism, get on with the task at hand rather than pausing for half an hour to coo over tiny horses. 

“Do you think you could ever run a farm?” Phil asks, inexplicably crouched down with his head through one of the slats in the fence. Dan’s having horrible little visions about his head getting stuck, having to try and wave down passersby to help Dan pull Phil out. 

“Absolutely not.” Dan doesn't even have to think about it, sometimes he’ll see farmer Bill out in the field, and he wonders how he’s doing everything he’s doing. To lift one bale of hay and not simply collapse from exhaustion is amazing in Dan’s eyes. “I want to spend time with all the cute fluffy creatures, but I don’t want to have to use a shovel to scoop up their shit, you know?”

“I—yes. I do know.” Phil’s petting a cute fluffy creature right now, keeps trying to plait their manes but it’s become increasingly obvious that Phil doesn’t know exactly what a plait is. He’s sort of screwing their hair up into a ball, then getting upset when that technique doesn’t resemble anything. “But I think if I just hand one little pony in my apartment that’d be ok, sort of like having a dog.”

“I don't think it’d be like having a dog.” 

“There are definitely dogs bigger, like… have you seen great danes? Huge.”

“Height wise, yeah.” Dan agrees.” Stooping down to Phil’s level to teach him how to plait because it’s just becoming sad at this point. “But muscle mass wise I think they’re a lot bigger.” 

“Stop ruining my dreams.” Phil sighs, like he’d known that all along and just wanted someone to tell him that a shetland pony running free in a London apartment would be fine. “Oh! Well now he looks so stylish.”

“I could plait your rats tail.” Dan teases, and he nearly goes arse over tit when Phil aims a particularly sharp elbow to his ribcage. “Oi! Uncalled for.” 

“It’s not a rats tail, it just a bit of slightly long hair.” 

“Whatever you say, mate.”

Dan stands up to avoid more elbow based carnage, admires his work from above. It’s honestly a fucking great plait. He should move into a line of work that involves getting horses ready for shows, cry on the sidelines when they win a corsage for being the most beautiful—he’s never been to a horse show, he has no idea how they work.

“I say shut up, you can’t say anything when your waves are so out of control.”

“Oi.” Dan warns. “They’re perfectly in control, it’s just my usual barber has gone on holiday and I don’t trust anyone else to wield scissors my way.” 

The pony neighs, as in agreement. Dan is correct to trust only one person in his life with any given task. It’s just—trust is hard. Trust is too easily broken. And that’s why all of this is so confusing, that’s why he has no idea why he’s so eager to trust Phil. How easily he’s willing to do all this with him. 

“I cut my own hair once, it did not go good. Trying to sort out the back of your head when you can’t see the back of your own head doesn’t work.” Phil says, and he’s progressed his bonding experience with the pony who is now laying flat on the grass. They’re essentially nose to nose, having whispered conversations that Dan can’t hear from so high up. Something about the entire sight makes Dan trust him even more. He thinks people’s behaviour with animals says a lot, and the fact Phil is on his knees with his head through the fence can only say good things. 

“Is that why you still have the rats tail?” 

“Oh, me and my new friend are so talking about you down here.” 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

“I think we’ve got enough bin bags, right?” Phil opens up the door, and the hallway is just as scary second time around. “I want to try and give as much as I can to charity instead of just yeeting it.” 

The owner of the shop hadn’t said anything, but the look in his eyes was one of mild terror. It was fine to sell gay magazines to Dan, but to be actually gay in his shop was something else. Not that Dan was being gay in his shop, apart from literally _being_ gay, wasn’t like him and Phil were holding hands and skipping down the small aisles. It’ll get around, he’ll be big news tomorrow.  Is Dan now actively performing gay activities, instead of just being passively gay? What a scandal. Front page news on _we’re ok with everything until it actually happens._ But despite all that Dan isn’t trying to run, he’s dug his feet down into the dirt and he’s going to stay. Maybe its his mission to single-handedly bring the village out of the 1980’s. 

“I’d say two hundred bin bags is enough bin bags, yeah.” Dan says. “Unless we find some bodies hidden away, then we might need some more.”

“Don’t even joke whilst we’re standing in this hallway.” 

Dan laughs and pushes at Phil until they end up in the living room, that has better vibes despite all the dusty mustard and floral drapes. He still doesn't get how he never saw the house before, his theory on Phil being magic still ever so slightly playing on his mind. 

“Where do you want to start?” 

“Here? I guess. Do one room then work our way up.” Phil’s already on his knees, using his arms to scoop everything off the coffee table and onto the floor. “Maybe we should take some of this stuff onto Antiques Roadshow, see if there’s a million pound umbrella stand hidden amongst all the— is this a coaster with a vagina on it?” 

“Hm.” Dan tips his head to the side, squints. “Yeah, I’d say so.” 

“Ok.” Phil nods, delicately sliding it into the bin bag. It does have a huge coffee stain on it, so that’s probably the reason it gets chucked, as opposed to Phil secretly waging a war on vaginas. 

“It’s going to get super weird isn't it?” This is only the first room, Dan dreads to think what they’re going to uncover as they get further through the house. “If we find any dildos then— no, not even thinking about it.”

“You would have to sort them out, it’d be like incest by dildo association.”

Dan blinks, then gently bonks his head against the doorframe to make sure he’s not dreaming. “What the fuck.” 

“It’s true!”

“I can truly say that’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear in my life. Ever.” Honestly Phil dropping to one knee and proposing had seemed more likely. “And I don’t ever want to hear it again.”

“Cos you know I’m right.” Phil grumbles beneath his breath, but Dan hears it. He’s about to start a fight about the possible logistics, but then Phil is patting the floor beside him in invitation—a white flag to end this hell conversation. “Come help.”

The carpet is rough, feels like sitting on a million burlap sacks stitched together. He tries not to wriggle around too much, doesn’t want Phil to feel the need to accommodate to him. He suffers through all the itchy, just wishes he’d have foregone the suit trousers and shoved on some joggers. 

“What’s the system?” Dan asks, rolling his shirt sleeves up. If Phil stutters over a word and gets fixated by the flesh on show, Dan pretends to not notice. He wants all these moments of _something_ , but they’re fucking terrifying when they actually happen. This is all temporary, a state of flux in a house that’s going to be sold soon. He doesn’t want to start properly liking someone who isn’t going to be able to stick around. 

“Keep things or throw away things.”

“Ok but what do you want to keep?” Dan picks up a dead plant, holds it up for inspection. “Like is this worthy of staying?”

“No… but the pot is nice, maybe remove the dead plant and we’ll keep the pot for other things.” Phil takes it off him, makes five attempts to delicately remove the plant before he just rips it out and scatters dirt everywhere. “We will hoover when we’re done.” 

“We?”

“Me.” 

Dan nods, then goes back to his pile. All he’s getting is Betty was eclectic. There are things in here he never knew existed before today. He does find one of those ball in a cup things though, and that distracts them both for a solid twenty minutes. He’s the victor in their made up game, wherein the loser has to be the one to open the fridge. 

“We’re in the living room right now, the fridge is in the kitchen… which is not today’s room.” Phil’s trying to argue his way out of it, or at least prolong his fate. “Deal? I’ll do it next time? The kitchen will probably be a next time room.”

“Fine.” Dan agrees. “But don’t think I’ll forget.” 

After ten minutes of decisive decision making, wherein a bin bag becomes full, Phil decides he’s had enough. “This carpet is itchy.” 

“It is!” Dan agrees, bit too enthusiastically. “Should we get some cushions to sit on?”

They end up sat on something that might be one of those pregnancy pillows but—god—is it comfortable compared to the hell that was the carpet.

“We good? Can we go on?”

“Yes. No longer being stabbed.” Phil seems quite content to continue on with his rummage, gets stuck on a photo album filled with photos of women he doesn’t know. He keeps looking for her in them, trying to see if he can remember without having to call up his mum and ask. “I think—her?”

Phil’s pointing at a woman who is a definite possibility, Dan’s never noticed head shape before but now it’s all he can concentrate on. 

“Yeah.” Dan agrees, taking the album off Phil so he can hold it up beside him and make a side by side comparison. “Definitely. I know it’s black and white but I still think you have the same eye colour.” 

“I feel bad.” Phil sighs, turning his head so they’re no longer side by side. “I really—I don’t remember her, and she obviously thought enough of me to leave all this.” 

“You can’t help that, Phil.” Dan puts the photo album down onto the coffee table, a definite keep item. “She obviously didn’t hold a grudge, you’re sitting in her house. Families—they’re difficult. You were obviously just a child when whatever happened happened. You didn’t play any part in it.” 

“I should’ve at least made an effort to try and see her.”

“Phil.” Dan starts, hand hovering in mid-air before dropping down gently onto Phil’s shoulder. “You didn’t even know she existed before you came to see me.” 

“I know.” Phil says, but he looks like he’s a second away from throwing a minor tantrum. And it’s understandable—it’s _frustrating_ —because Phil got torn away from someone who obviously loved him because of issues out of his control. “I’m going to, like, at least find out as much about her now.” 

“Going through literally everything she ever owned is a good start.” 

The coffee table pile is a job all of its own, takes longer thean both of them ever expected because so much of it is so interesting. They pause to read excerpts of random books, to go through another photo album, to piece together the fact the vagina coaster was actually just the start of a whole set of genitals. Phil seems genuinely upset about the fact they’re so permanently coffee stained, keeps claiming how his own coffee table really needed something—some _pizzazz._

“God, this is a love letter.” Dan gets past the first line before he feels like he’s intruding, tucks it back away in its envelope. “Who even writes them anymore?” 

“It’s sweet.” Phil says. “But I’m too scared to rate it incase in gets a bit of… an adult rating.” 

“Written pornography?”

“Exactly.” 

“But you don’t wanna throw them away, right?” Dan asks, because it feels odd to. To bundle up these truly personal pieces of someones life and chuck them into a bin bag. 

“No.” Phil shakes his head, pats the coffee table where a pile of to keep has been steadily growing. “Course not. That would be evil, I think.” 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

They break for lunch a couple of hours in, when Phil starts actively complaining about being an empty vessel. He’s so dramatic, in a way that Dan isn’t. It’s—odd. Because Dan would describe himself as loud and too much, but Phil’s brand of dramatic is entertaining and ever so slightly charming. Not the sort that makes you want to roll your eyes, but the sort to make you laugh and join in. 

“You ate a chocolate bar from your pocket when we walked through the door, on top of the chocolate bar I gave you in my office.”

“Chocolate isn’t for feeling full, chocolate is for fun.” Phil argues, already standing up because he’s on a mission to get Dan out of the house and down the road. He’d started hinting a solid half an hour ago, kept going on and on about sausage until he had Dan laughing and begging him to _stop saying it like that._

“Fine, fine. Help me up.” Dan holds out a hand, tortures himself a little bit by thinking about how nicely their fingers slot together. “Stop grunting!”

“You’re—big, a big man filled with probably running muscles.” Phil whines, getting his other hand involved so he can fully get ahold of Dan, who’s putting in zero attempt to help, to his feet. “You’re doing this on purpose! Stop going—stop making yourself limp.” 

“It’s just my bones, Phil. I literally don’t control them.” 

“You do! Your bones are you.” Phil looks about a second away from pulling his own arm out of socket, so Dan finally assists and if they crash into each other a little bit when Dan eventually lands on his feet—well—maybe that was by design. 

Phil grumbles and complains all the way to the front-door, mutters under his breath about people being difficult. But the smile on his face ruins it, the way he keeps bashing their shoulders together ruins it too. Dan’s properly obsessed with him. 

Dan’s not been with anyone in a while, barely spends time with people even. His life is quite solitary, he locks himself up in an office all day then locks himself up in his flat. His interactions are limited to the people who live here, and he already knows everyone here well enough to know they’d never be more than just acquaintances. So Phil is a fucking breath of fresh air, Phil makes Dan feel a bit more alive than he has done lately. 

They skip out on Dan’s car and take the short walk to the chippy instead, down a cute little country lane surrounded by trees—something that’s nice in the day time but would make Dan shit himself at night. Phil seemingly has a lot to say about everything, comments on the flowers growing down around the base of the fences, on the way you can so clearly hear birdsong in a way that’s impossible in London. He starts sounding a bit jealous, starts checking the quality of the air on his phone at some point. 

“See! It’s high air quality. Knew it.” 

“Well—yeah. London is like ridiculously polluted, Phil, and you’ve seen that about seven people live here.” Dan’s hand skims over a bush and he can’t help but rip off a leaf, fiddle with it all the way down the road until it’s no longer anything. 

“Maybe I’d stop getting migraines if the air was better.” Phil theorises, but it seems to be mainly to himself. He goes quiet after that, keeps staring at everything they pass like he’s trying to weigh it all up. Would here be a good place for him to live? Should he keep the house and leave London behind? They’ve only met twice but Dan really finds himself hoping so.  The silence is fine, the silence isn’t awkward. They’re just two people on a walk. Two people who don’t need to fill the space with noise. Dan wants to think that means something, but he can’t trust his own judgement on this. Not when he knows part of him might just be latching onto a fantasy because he has nothing else to latch onto. 

“We’re here.” Dan says, catching onto Phil’s sleeve to pull him a few steps backwards. He hadn’t even noticed, just walked straight past the place that had the food he’d wanted so badly ten minutes ago. “You’re heading towards the river.” 

“Oh.” Phil blinks, then blinks again. It looks like he’s waking up from a weird dream, can’t quite get his bearings on reality. “Is the river nice?” 

“Yeah, Phil, the river is nice.” Dan spends a bit too much time down there, sitting on the bank just watching. 

Watching the birds float about is relaxing, the peace and quiet offered is different to the silence of his own flat. It’s less suffocating, more freeing. It feels like he’s actually doing something with his day, even if he is still doing it alone. Maybe it'd be nice to go down there with someone, to have Phil sat beside him making up stories about the lives of geese.  He thinks about it the entire time they’re inside ordering, then he thinks about it some more. It’s the middle of December, it’s fucking freezing, but he still can’t get the idea out of his head now it’s made a home for itself. They’re both wearing coats, and there’s a nice bench under some trees that’d probably work for the half an hour it’d take to eat. 

Dan suggests it the minute they step out the door, and Phil just smiles and gives a little nod.Dan swings the bag as they walk, feels ridiculously peppy considering all this is is eating outside in the cold. But it’s eating with someone, it’s eating with someone he actually wants to spend time with. 

“Oh! Geese. Can they eat chips?” Phil asks the second them come into sight—Dan had been right to do this, to suggest they come here. 

“Erm—I dunno. Google it.” Dan dumps the bag in the middle of the bench whilst Phil wanders off to bother some geese, even though that’s probably the animal you should bother the least. Dan wants to pull him back and share a story about how he’d once been chased by one through a park, had to sit on top of a bin until they got bored and left. But Phil seems to have some sort of fucking physic connection with them, they just happily float along beside him as he walks up and down the edge of the river googling _can geese eat greasy food?_

“It says they cause bloating. Do you have bread?” Phil asks when he comes back and joins Dan, takes a seat on the other side. 

“No.” Dan laughs. “Why would I carry around random bread?”

“I dunno. I had chocolate in my pocket.” 

“Different things, I think.” Dan gently kicks the side of Phil’s foot, and he isn’t surprised when it turns into all out war. They’re both competitive, start betting their own food as a prize. There’s not even a proper game, just seems to turn into who can kick the hardest. Phil loses half a sausage, but then Dan immediately gives it back because he’s vegan.  They find bread in the form of the roll Phil had ordered to shove some of his chips in because _carbs and carbs is top tier combo, Dan._ Dan wants to say bread isn’t all that good for ducks either, but Phil looks so excited by the concept that Dan can’t bring himself to say it. Millions of people have fed bread to ducks for hundreds of years, just one half a roll won’t hurt. 

“Oooo, look at this one! It’s coming right up to me.” Phil’s sat crossed legged on the side of the river, apparently not caring that the ground is still half damp from this mornings rain.

“Be careful, might bite your entire hand off.” Dan says, coming to stand behind him. Just because then he can grab ahold of him, incase a goose tries to take a hold of Phil’s ankles and drag him in. 

“They wouldn’t, we’ve formed a friendship.” Phil says, and when a goose cranes its neck to delicately take a piece of bread from Phil’s hand, Dan believes him. He’s too good, too fucking perfect to even be real. Dan’s got to have knocked himself out by dropping a filing cabinet of gay magazines onto his own head. He’ll wake up in a second to no Phil, just a spread of arses on glossy pages. 

“Do you have any pets?”

“No.” Phil answers, and it’s definitely sad— a sad answer. “I used to have a bird, apart from it was a pigeon and it lived on my old balcony.” 

“A pigeon can be a pet.” 

Phil tips his head back, stares up at Dan with a smile so genuine that it knocks Dan’s heart out of rhythm. “Thanks. You’re the only person to actually say that.” 

“Stop it, you’re staring right up my nose. And at my three thousand chins.” 

“It’s a nice view.” 

“I highly doubt that.” Dan says, suddenly glad for the weird angles because from down there Phil can see him blushing. “Come on, we’d better get back before we freeze to death.” 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

“Does a bath needs taps?” 

“Yeah, Phil.” 

“Can—“ Phil frowns. “Really? Can that not be like a cool modern feature? Like a gaping hole of water just coming out?” 

Dan laughs too loud and it bounces around the room, disturbs all the ghosts that definitely live in the walls. “Shutup, idiot. You can’t sell a house with a gaping hole in it.” 

Phil looks—he looks pleased. Happy to have made Dan laugh like that, so over the top and loud. People usually look unhappy to have made that noise leave Dan’s mouth, like he’s ruining the quiet countryside life style. He likes the landscape of the place, likes living here for the peace it brings, but sometimes he really wishes he could fill it with other people. People like Phil, or just Phil. 

“Boring. I’m ahead of my time, just you wait. Next time you watch an episode of Grand Designs it’ll be all about the gaping hole feature.”

“Shoo.” Dan laughs. “I came up here for a piss, not for you to follow me into the bathroom and talk about holes.” 

Phil looks reluctant to leave, and if Dan were braver he might’ve just pissed right in front of him. It’d be no different to a public bathroom really. But as it is, he waits for Phil to leave. He’s stood right outside the door when Dan opens it, and it makes him scream—just a bit—press a hand against his chest like Phil is one of those ghosts they'd been discussing.

“Fucking hell.” Dan lets out a big puff of breath. “How are you so loud but so quiet at the same time?”

“Magic.” Phil shrugs. “Anyway, come on. We have work to do. Wanna get at least half the living room done before I leave.”

They ascend the creaky stairs nearly hand in hand, both of them refusing to go in front or behind. It’s a narrow thing and it doesn’t work, both of them nearly go flying at one point and when they reach the bottom they both do a stupid little giggle but they do not mention it. Do not talk about their silly little games that might be designed for closeness.

“We did the coffee table, is that not enough?” 

“No, we’ve still got bin bags to fill.” 

Phil’s back on his knees, this time heaving everything out of the sideboard in the corner of the room. Dan thinks it’s just all gay books, starts trying to think of how to drop in the fact he’s gay without making it obvious why. He just wants Phil to know. 

“Hi.” Dan joins him, picks up the book closest to him with—what’s supposed to be—a flourish. It’s more awkward, nearly launches it straight at Phil. “Gay books.”

“Yup.” Phil agrees. 

“I just have gay magazines, they’re no where near as fancy.” 

Phil smiles down at the floor, but Dan sees it. Dan clocks it because he’d been looking for it, hoping for it. Been wanting that split second of recognition, of happiness that they’re both wearing the same hat. 

And maybe he wants Phil to be happy about the fact that Dan is gay _specifically._

“I found gay magazines in the woods, pair the fact that I enjoyed them with my crush on Angel from Buffy and… well, you get this guy.” Phil makes a loose hand gesture towards himself, but he’s holding two books and it’s all a bit awkward. 

“Upset that my sexual awakening didn’t involve finding porn in the woods.” 

“Yeah?” Phil asks. “What did it involve?”

“Hmm.” Dan shrugs. “Maybe I’ll tell you another day.” 

“That’s teasing.” Phil sighs, dumping a couple books in a bin bag because they look like they’ve genuinely grown some mould. Everything about this house is so bizarre, the hallway being how it is, everywhere else being mainly regular but then—not. Like the bathroom is all fine until you realise there’s a giant hole in the bath where the taps should be. This sideboard is fine until you realise that—inexplicably—half of the books are damp. The carpet where they’re sat now is soft, but over the over side of the room it was like sitting on a bed of nails. 

“It’s something.” Dan smirks, then he changes the subject because he doesn't want to talk about getting laid at university right now. “Do you think that two people lived in this house?”

“I—maybe.” 

“It’s like everything is sort of opposite?” Dan wonders if the older possessions, the ones that look ruined, maybe belonged to another. Belonged to someone who passed away before Phil’s aunt did, and Phil’s aunt couldn’t bear to get rid of any of them. All these broken things stuck around because they belonged to the love of her life. But maybe he’s just living in a fantasy world, thinking about love too much. 

He doesn’t understand the bath still, that really doesn’t fit. 

“Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe if—maybe the letters were from someone who stuck around.” 

Dan wants to dig, wants to uncover whatever was going on. Find out if he’s right. Wants to know if a gay couple happily lived in this village without anyone even realising. But if he finds out he’d want to unfind out, because the idea that he could’ve felt less alone in this place is breaking him a bit—but that’s selfish. He’s not going to stop Phil from finding out everything he can. 

They go through all the books and they keep the ones that are readable, pop them on the coffee table with the rest of the pile. Dan already knows he’ll have to be the one to go out and find some boxes, already has a couple places in mind. Surely all those gay magazines arrive in boxes. 

“I should get going.” Phil yawns. “I think the last train is in twenty minutes.”

“I can drive you to the station.” Dan offers, partly because he’s nice but mainly because he wants to extend their time together. “And I’ll grab some boxes before you come back, so we can actually make room.” 

“Sounds good.” Phil smiles, and it’s so soft and sleepy. Dan almost wants to suggest Phil just stay. Come back to his flat. “I should probably take your phone number, the one I can text not the office one.” 

“Kay, sure. Just don’t text me any photos of your gaping hole architect designs.” 

Phil shoves him, hard. 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

Hi it’s Phil.Thanks for today :D. I think I would’ve felt weird about being in there on my own. 

Hey, it’s fine! I usually just sit in my office staring at the farm, probably did me some good to talk to a human as opposed to a cow.

Idk. I would say cows > Phil

What about cows = Phil

Hmmm…I will allow it. See you Thursday?

Thursday sounds good, yeah

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as alwaaays lemme know your thoughts, if u have any


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ERM HI. so i decided i had more word ideas for this fic, so now it's 4 chaps instead of 3

Dan’s life revolves around three things: waiting for Phil to text him, waiting for Phil to turn up and then being upset when Phil leaves. And maybe it’s technically one thing, maybe his entire life revolves around Phil. And he can’t work out if that’s because he’s been alone for so long, or if it’s just because he’s genuinely— likes him.

And that’s a trick, that’s Dan trying to convince himself out of being _that_ sort of person. The person that falls in love in a second, the sort of person who wears their heart on their sleeve. He’d usually have said he isn’t, that he’s good at keeping a distance, but Phil has flipped that on its head. Now he might be that person, now he might believe in love at first sight. Living in a rom-com isn’t too bad, but it’s awful when you’re not sure if you’re going to get the happy ending. 

Over the past couple of weeks they’ve been in that house a total of nine times. Phil hadn’t been joking about coming—essentially— everyday. And Dan isn’t complaining about it, even if he is getting slightly behind on paperwork. They’ve managed most of downstairs, mainly without any casualties. Apart from the time Phil opened the fridge and nearly fainted. It turns out that old milk is not a nice smell, and old cheese is even worse. 

But the problem is every time Phil turns up Dan gets a bit more attached, a bit more eager to offer up the too small sofa in his flat. Part of him is begging Phil to start asking about hotels in the area, just so he can swoop in.

The people in the village have been talking, they ask Dan where his friend is whenever they see him out and about. Dan makes up something about work, which isn’t technically untrue. It doesn’t matter that Dan is point blank refusing to take any of Phil’s money. 

He knows what they’re all assuming, that he and Phil are together. But honestly, Dan likes to assume that sometimes too. Walk around the village and just pretend this is their life which is—god, really fucking weird. 

**Phil:** Nearly there!!!!!

**Dan:** Ok!!!!!! You don’t have to be so excited !!!! We are cleaning the bathroom today!!!!!

**Phil:** Ugh. Can we just... Pretend it doesn’t exist? 

**Dan:** You’re the one so fascinated by the gaping hole feature. 

**Phil:** Don’t use my words against me >:(

Phil comes through the door in a way that’s almost suspiciously calm. Usually he falls through it, or you can hear his feet running up the gravel path. Dan turns to look out the window and sees there’s nothing in the field today, which would explain Phil’s normal human behaviour. Running isn’t worth the effort if there’s not the promise of a cute farm animal at the end of it.

“Boring.” Phil announces, shucking off his coat like he does every single time. He almost always immediately puts it back on because he knows they don’t stay here. They don’t come here to hang out in Dan’s freezing cold little office all day. “Where are they? They don’t hibernate, they’re not bears.”

“Dunno.” Dan’s never actually seen it empty before, but then—maybe it’s to do with the plan. Maybe Bill has gone all out for Dan, maybe everyone in this village isn’t as bad as Dan likes to imagine. “Sleeping?”

“Well—fine. But they’d better be there when we get back, otherwise what’s the point.”

“And here I was, thinking you came here to see me.” Dan laughs, but maybe a little part of him means it. Maybe he likes to imagine Phil’s dragging all this out for as long as humanly possible just to spend time with him. Because it could’ve been finished a while ago, they could’ve stopped all these back and forth trips and just sold it at an auction as is. 

But he’s not—he’s aware that it’s not _him_. That it’s just a case of Phil wants to be delicate with everything. He properly wants to sort through all the possessions, to make sure he’s not throwing anything away that has meaning. He’s good like that, cares about sentiment. Cares about things in general. 

“I mean, you’re a pretty big part of it.”

Dan just makes a little noise, because—honestly—that’s all he’s capable of. It’s probably a joke, but his heart doesn’t treat it as such. His heart is doing a whole damn circus act in his chest, all backflips and celebrations. 

“Earth to Dan.”

“Sorry, just thinking about erm—animals.” Dan lies, but Phil probably sees straight through it if the the raised eyebrow is anything to go by. 

“Ok.” Phil shrugs, and he’s definitely just ignoring Dan’s moment to be kind. “So, house time?”

“Not right away.”

“No?” Phil asks, ignoring the chair in favour of plonking himself on Dan’s desk.One of these days he’s going to go straight through it, whine when he gets the mother of all splinters in an awful place. “We sitting in your cold office? I’ll put my coat back on.”

“No.” Dan laughs, because now he knows Phil’s aware of the whole coat thing it’s even funnier—how committed he is to his stupid act. 

“No?” Phil frowns, manoeuvring himself until he can prod at Dan with the toe of his trainer. Dan wants to bat him away, tell him he’s filthy, but grabbing onto his ankle seems like a much better alternative. 

“I could pull and you’d go flying off this desk.” Dan warns.

“Do it.”

And they’re in a bit of a weird position now. Phil’s essentially right there—right in front of Dan. Bracketing him with his legs, staring down at him with all this challenge in his eyes. It’d be so easy to pull, to get a lap full of a Phil. But he’s still still too scared of the reality of all this, of knowing Phil will have to leave again. 

That one hour train ride isn’t going to win any world records for being the longest distance romance on earth, apart from for Dan it _would_ win. Because Dan’s full of all this need for constant reassurance, for closeness, for coming home and having someone there to talk to. 

“Idiot.” Dan lets go of him. “Bill said if we’re gonna stand creepily at his fence a few times a week, then we may as well actually go in and see them all up close.”

“Oh?” Phil squeaks out, then tries to pretend he hadn’t by lowering his tone drastically cos his next few words. “Like a petting zoo?”

“I mean in theory, yeah. But I dunno if he’ll have gone to the lengths of cleaning up all the animal shit for us.”

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

There are lambs, Dan can see them through the small window to the left. He wants to go in, to hold them until he feels something. Until they make him see all the good in the world via their soft fur. He’s sort of reached a point of no return, where the only things making him sure of life being worth living are small animals and—well, Phil.

Bill is stood in front of them, straw cap on, wellies, may as well have a piece of hay in his mouth. He looks like a proper farmer, which makes sense because he is. Dan just—he’s so used to corporate that he’d forgotten farmers exist outside of movies and tv shows. 

“It’s not lamb season, is it?” Dan asks, because he’s pretty sure that’s in the spring. He remembers school trips to farms, seeing lambs being born when you’re just nine years old is a pretty life changing thing. 

“Dunno. Can hardly stop a sheep from fucking when it wants.” Bill shrugs. And it’s so heavily unexpected that Dan doesn’t know what to do, just ends up tightly gripping Phil’s bicep in lieu of screaming. He can feel Phil giving him the side-eye, but he knows if he turns around he’ll _lose_ it. “Anyway, call me if you need me. They should all be behaving, they’ve just been fed.”

“Did you just fucking hear that? I can’t look him in the eye.” Dan finally stops holding Phil, even though he could’ve quite happily have done it all day. There’s just—something. Something about Phil that’s made him stupid. Something about Phil that’d made him turn down the bloke who comes in from out of town to fix the electrics in his office. 

And that’s how he knows it’s more than just this—fascination. This desire to be with literally anyone. He wonders what Phil would say about it all, if he’d enjoy being the reason for Dan’s _no, sorry_. 

“Sheep can fuck whenever they like Dan.” Phil deadpans, and it’s supposed to be funny but hearing that word come out Phil’s mouth is just doing all sorts to Dan’s brain. 

“Mhm.” 

“What?” Phil laughs. “I’ve sworn like a billion times in that house.”

“Yeah.” Dan agrees, because he has. He’s quite good at walking into everything, letting out a string of expletives as he carves another part of his shin out on the coffee table. “Never that intense though.”

“Come here.”

“What.”

“Come here.” Phil beckons him forward with a finger, and Dan goes _so_ easily. They’re stood close enough that Dan can smell Phil’s aftershave—something sweet, because of course- can see all three colours in his eyes, could be having another moment involving thinking about leaning in. 

“Ok? I’m here.”

“Fuck.” Phil whispers, and Dan doesn’t know what to do. It’s— on purpose. It’s so fucking on purpose. That tone, the little way he darts his tongue out afterwards. All of it’s unfair, and all if it’s _working_.Dan knows he’s gone red, knows he keep opening and closing his mouth like a fucking idiot. 

Phil just giggles, pushes Dan out of the way to get to the real good part of the day. 

“Wanker.” Dan says, but Phil’s already too far away to hear it.

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

“I think I wanna live in here.” Phil’s sprawled out on the ground, ignoring the definite animal shit going on. He says he’s found the perfect spot, but what he’s actually done is put on some blue overalls to avoid ruining his own clothes. He’s got a lamb playing a game with him, somehow. 

“Ask Bill, maybe he’s gay. I think his hat was a bit gay.”

“Bit old for me.” 

“Not into older men?” Dan asks, kicking at the floor until he creates the _actual_ perfect spot. Then he joins Phil down there, sat cross legged so he can try and tempt a lamb to come curl up on him. But he doesn’t actually know if lambs work like dogs. 

“Nah, like men who bring me to petting zoos.” 

“Easily pleased.” Dan laughs, and—fuck. Maybe he should’ve kissed Phil. Maybe he might stick around. Maybe…it doesn’t matter. Phil doesn’t belong in that house, no matter how much rubbish they get rid of. He’s too much for it. He’s going to sell it. He’s obviously going to remain living in London. 

So all this flirting is just for fun, all this flirting is because—just because. It doesn’t matter if Phil seems a bit disappointed by Dan’s stupid response, doesn’t matter if Phil keeps creating situations in which they’re forced to be close. 

“Yeah.” Phil sighs, dragging himself up from the ground so he can go explore beyond the lambs. 

Dan just stays on the floor for a second, tries to calm himself down by burying his fingers in white fluff. He can’t quite get a grasp on any of this, keeps trying to work out if he’s the one being unfair. If he’s the one who keeps accidentally refusing all of Phil’s advances, but then confusing him by flirting right back. 

“Thoughts?

The lamb baa’s, and it’s definitely calling him stupid.

“You found the fluffy cows again.” Dan finds Phil after he finally convinces himself to get up. To go face whatever situation he’d accidentally created. It’s not like either of them are _obviously_ offering anything, not like Phil has literally asked him out and Dan’s turned him down. 

Not like he’s turned Phil down, but then continued to act like he really wants to be asked out. 

But then maybe Phil making all these trips up here is... obvious. Maybe the fact he spends more time talking to Dan than actually tidying is obvious. 

“Yup.” Phil says. 

“Do you think they remember you from last time even without the hat?”

“Maybe.” Phil’s leant up against the metal gate, trying to convince them all to come over and see him. So far he’s just got the one, all the others too busy eating. “Think this might be the one who wore the hat, do you still have the photo?”

“Yeah.” Dan starts to dig around in his pockets for his phone but then—

“Doesn’t matter.” Phil decides. “I know in my heart this is the cow who wore the hat.”

And it’s weird, because now Phil does look like he belongs here. In a peaceful place, in a village that’s too big to contain him. Wrapped up in a blue boiler suit, covered in hay, petting a cow that _definitely_ remembers him. Dan wants this, so fucking much. 

“Think you’re actually going to have to stick around, he might get separation anxiety.” And Dan hopes it’s obvious he’s talking about more than just the cow. 

“I wouldn’t mind.” Phil’s voice is wistful, and Dan can’t quite work out why. Sounds like he’s pining for a life he doesn’t have, but desperately wants. “London is a lot sometimes.” 

“It is.” Dan agrees, and he thinks they’re back on their usual page. No longer any of that tension Dan had created by being an idiot. “I used to live there, you know.”

“Oh?” Phil asks, face awash with curiosity. “Where? Why’d you move.”

“Because it’s a lot.” Dan laughs. “And— I don’t know. Just wanted somewhere that wasn’t so loud all of the time, somewhere that wasn’t so... switched on. I felt like there was this weird amount of pressure just involved in being there, like you had to be constantly doing something amazing to warrant your existence.”

Phil nods along, and Dan hopes he gets it. Like he doesn’t just sound like a child who couldn’t handle the pressures of adult life.But Phil isn’t his father, so probably no worries there. 

“I think—London is like, you’re expected to go to everything, show up to every event otherwise you’re boring. When I lived in Manchester I liked having the excuse of being too far away, but now I’m maybe ten minutes down the road and everyone thinks I’m ignorant, or no fun, because I don’t want to go out every night.” Phil blurts, and it sounds like something he’s been wanting to get off his chest for a while. Dan’s glad he’s trusted enough for it. “Sorry. Forgot to pause for breath.” 

“S’fine. Me and the cows will listen to all your problems, we make a pretty good therapist team.” 

“Have I actually told you my job?”

“Oh.” Dan frowns, because that’s really knocked him out of fantasy land. He’s been imagining them living together, building an entire life together, but he still doesn’t even know the basic details. “No, you haven’t.”

“Usually don’t.” Phil’s eyes go back to the cow, and it’s odd to see him so nervous. He’s a chronic over sharer. Dan knows about Phil’s first sexual experience, but he doesn’t know his job. Dan knows about Phil’s weird piss schedule, but he doesn’t know his middle name. It’s all a bit strange, how they are, what they choose to reveal. “Makes me sound like a twat.”

“Well now you have to tell me.” Because Dan’s imagining up all sorts in his head, and all of them are likely wildly incorrect. 

“I’m a YouTuber.”

“Fuck off.”

“See!” Phil laughs. “Twat central.”

“No—no.” Dan corrects. “It’s just when I was younger I had this massive dream about being a YouTuber, but then I went and did a law course instead.”

“Suits you.”

“What? Lawyer?” Dan pulls a face, all scrunched up and— Phil’s an idiot if he thinks that. 

“No, I don’t think you’ve actually told me any...” Phil thinks, “law? Yeah, that. YouTuber. You’d probably suit that. You’re all... I don’t know. Larger than life.”

“You saying I’m a show off who can’t keep quiet?” Dan asks, but he bumps their shoulders together just to make it clear he’s joking. And maybe just because they haven’t touched in a while. 

“No, I’m saying you’re entertaining. And you’re funny... smart sometimes too.” 

“Just sometimes?” Dan asks, to try and distract himself from all those other compliments. To try and distract himself from the even bigger life he’s now building for them in his funky little brain. 

“Definitely just sometimes. You already forget I saw you trip up the stairs, then trip down them five minutes later?”

“I think... that was actually a dream.” Dan’s definitely not thought about that every night of his life since it happened. 

“Nope, I remember catching you. Nearly knocked me backwards too. Imagine if we both died in that house because of your clown feet.”

“Shutup.” Dan whines, and the cow absolutely hates it when he lightly punches Phil in the top of the arm. Moos so loudly Dan almost shits himself. “Jesus. I think you’ve got a protector for life there.”

“What can I say? I know cow language, and we’ve been talking about you all morning. She knows about your stash of filthy magazines, and she’s not impressed.” Phil leans in, makes this noise that is supposed to be a whisper but just sounds like the world’s worst attempt at beatboxing. 

“I think you’re just spitting in the cows ear.”

“No.” Phil shakes his head, looks over at Dan likes he’s the stupid one in this scenario. “That’s cow language. It’s not my fault you’re too stupid to understand.”

“Learn it on duolingo?”

“No.” Phil says, but then his face turns into a picture of excitement—like he’s just thought of something amazing. “Leant it on duocowgo.”

Dan pushes him off the gate. 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

The house is just as they left it, Dan has no idea why he thought otherwise. Just something about the conversation at the farm, it being something bigger than usual. Half of him had wanted to walk in and the house to be transformed, to be something with the capability to handle Phil and all his multitudes. 

But it’s the same, and Phil still doesn’t want to live in it. The days Phil isn’t here are the days Dan actually works, and a big part of that work has been to get Phil a fair price for the place. He’s been working with a local estate agent, but he reckons they’re best off just selling it at auction. There’s too many issues with it, things they’d have to spend money to fix if they wanted to properly market it as a family home. One night Dan sat down and actually did some calculations, worked out the price of fixing the thing was basically the same as the amount they’d be able to sell it for.

When he mentioned to Phil that auction was their best option he got all excited. Started listing off them midday tv shows on BBC one, got really passionate about trying to become the stars of a _homes under the hammer_ episode. When Dan told him that’d take years, Phil quickly changed his mind. 

“It at least smells better now.” Phil notes, giving the air a sniff, but it ends with giving Dan one instead. “Less mouldy cheese, now more mouldy man.”

“Oh, fuck off. You literally sprawled out over shit on the farm.” Dan wants to point out the fact that he was the one to go out and buy air freshener plug-ins, that he’d been the one with all the bright ideas. But Phil’s gone off and left him again, he always seems to do that—leaves just as Dan thinks of a comeback. 

“We done down here?” Phil shouts from the kitchen, the kitchen he’s definitely making a mid afternoon feast in right now. Once the fridge stopped being such a bio-hazard they went out and did a mini food shop. It made sense, Phil was spending so much of his time here and the grease from all the chippy lunches was apparently _making him really sweaty._

“Think so, yeah. There’s that little room in the back, but that all just looked like gardening stuff.” He finds Phil doing exactly as predicted, piling a plate up with crap he’d found in _Tesco._ “Mate, that sandwich is bigger than you.”

“It’s to share, plus it’s got cucumber in it which is healthy.” 

“Does that cancel out all the bread?”

“Bread is healthy.”

“Is it?”

“All food is healthy if you never look at... _Instagram_.” Phil argues, and Dan just laughs. Sometimes trying to argue back is a pointless endeavour, because sometimes Phil is just uniquely correct about life.

After a lunch of literally everything Phil could find stuffed into a sandwich, they get to work. Sort of. They sort of work, they sort of fuck around and try on the clothes hung on the back of the bathroom door. Phil makes a striking vision in a floral dressing gown, and he also thinks Dan should always be wearing a sheer blouse. 

“You could see my nipples, that’s not professional.”

“I couldn’t see them.”

“Cos I’m wearing it over my actual shirt.” Dan points out, he wasn’t about to get semi-nude in this weird bathroom. “But if I wore it without then it would be definite nipple display.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Phil shrugs out the dressing gown, stares at it for a good minute or so before shoving it in a bin bag. “Hole in it.”

“Ah.” Dan nods. “And this?”

“Hmmm...” Phil’s close again, running his fingers over the fabric. Pausing at where it lays all bunched up over Dan’s too broad shoulders, it might have been oversized but it still didn’t exactly work. “I think you should show me it later, without your shirt underneath. I can’t judge it like this, unfair.”

Dan’s just— a noise. When he’s around Phil he becomes this horrible, disgusting and pathetic noise. But he can’t help it, he thinks everything Phil does is designed to drive him up the wall. 

“That a yeah?”

“That’s a… maybe.”

But he would go back to his office and do just that if Phil were being serious, and that’s a bit sad. It’s like that whole things your parents used to say when you were a child _. If he jumped off a bridge, would you?_ And Dan would usually say no, but if Phil did then there’s a high possibility Dan would follow. Because if Phil’s doing it, then there’s probably something fun and cool down there.

“A maybe?”

“Yeah, a maybe.” 

Phil takes a step back, seemingly satisfied with the answer. 

“It’s not too bad in here, is it?” 

“It’s only a bathroom, I don’t know what—oh, there’s a toy crab here.”

“Oh, keep. Definitely keep.”

The bathroom is fine, the bathroom is the least chaotic of the rooms so far. It’s honestly quite typically just… a bathroom. Nothing too wild in the cupboards, unless you count the laxatives that Phil seems to really want to try. _Just to see, Dan._ There’s some medicine that isn’t open, and Dan doesn’t feel right about just chucking it in the bin, so he tucks it away in his coat pocket so the pharmacy can do whatever the pharmacy does with things. 

The hole in the bath is still a mystery, but at auction it won’t matter because the whole point of them is _fixer uppers._ No one is going into auction expecting pristine, no one is going in _not_ expecting holes in bathtubs. Dan does keep envisioning this little waterfall effect—and how pretty it’d be—so maybe Phil was onto something there. 

“There was nothing fun in here.”

“The crab.”

“Ok.” Phil agrees. “The crab is pretty fun. I think he’ll love living on my bathroom windowsill.”

Dan smiles, but these are the parts he hates. The reminders of Phil’s life being elsewhere, the reminders that Phil definitely has no plans of escaping London and all it’s loud and— too much. 

“Lucky crab.”

Phil just smirks and shoves the thing into his backpack. 

“How is it nearly five already?” Phil asks, and Dan doesn’t believe him until he looks at the time on his phone. They’d spent so much time at the makeshift petting zoo, then even more time eating a sandwich big enough for a family of ten. 

“We haven’t even really made any progress today, maybe this place will take us a year and we should’ve applied to go on H _omes Under the Hammer_.” 

“Don’t even joke about that.” 

“I doubt they would’ve even looked at our application, we’re out in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and we’re hardly in the real estate... land?”

“Market?”

“Yeah.” Dan nods. “That sounds more right.”

“Are you sure you know how to do your job?” Phil teases. “Think I know more dead people terms than you do.”

“I don’t think real estate market is a dead person term.”

“I think....” Phil pauses, for too long a period of time. Dan thinks he’s going to say something important, so he keeps quiet. “Shutup and let me have this.”

“Alright. Dead people love the real estate market.” 

Phil lets out little cheer, then realises he’s sort of celebrating people dying so he stops and apologises to his great aunt. 

“Anyway.” Dan slaps his thighs before he stands. “We ready?”

“Yeah, think so. Don’t want to miss the train.” He stands up, his crab in his back back and this look of guilt all over his face. “I feel really bad that we didn’t do more in here today.”

“Look—I’m sure part of her leaving you this house also meant she wanted you to explore the local area.”

“Are you sure?” Phil looks pensive, eyes darting around the room like her ghostly form is going to appear to disagree with Dan. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel less evil?”

“I’m sure, Phil.”

“Ok. But next time we have to do double the work. No banter, only cleaning and organising.”

Dan agrees, but his fingers are crossed behind his back the entire time. 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

When they leave the house it’s to a torrential downpour. They’d both been too wrapped up in their own little world—in their silly games designed for touching, for flirting—to realise. It’d probably been hammering down against the roof, but all Dan had been able to hear was the hammering of his own heart every time Phil looked at him for a beat too long. 

They leg it to the car, but it’s the sort of rain where even one second of being in it results in you being soaked. 

“Shit.” Dan pants, trying to warm himself up by sticking his hands in front of his tiny car heater. “How did we not know that was coming when we opened the door?”

“I dunno, maybe the house is double ... big. Insulated? That the word? Than anything?” Phil’s shivering in the passenger seat, and Dan’s not expecting it to result in holding hands. But that’s what happens. Phil’s hands gently placed over Dan’s so they can share the minuscule amount of heat. And it warms Dan up, but in a different way entirely. 

“Yeah I love that double big house.” Dan snorts, but he’s cut off from all the being a dick when Phil squeezes his hands. 

“Shush.”

“Yes.”

“Stupid.” Phil laughs, and Dan wants to chase after him when he lets go. “See! This is why I don’t think I could ever actually drive. If I came outside to this rain I’d just... go back inside.”

“Sorry I can’t make the meeting, it’s raining?”

“Exactly.” Phil nods his head, and he seems thrilled about Dan getting _it_ —the it being yet unknown. “If I tried to drive in this weather then you’d be reading out my will.”

“Dark.” Dan starts up the car, because now he just wants to show off to Phil that’s he really fucking good at driving in the rain. Maybe that’ll do it for him, push them

out of this weird zone they’ve gotten themselves into. 

“But true, if you ask my mum about... the incident, then you’d understand.”

“I don’t think I want to.”

-

They get to the station and all trains are cancelled, which honestly Dan should’ve expected. British public transport is shit, and one leaf on the line is the end of the world. Enough water to drown them both via just literally standing on the street was obviously going to result in cancellations.

“Well... I guess I’ll be sleeping on the ground outside WHSmith.” Phil jokes, but he does look worried. He’s gnawing at his lower lip, and wringing his hands as he desperately looks up at the board in hopes all the cancelled services will magically disappear and be replaced by actual times. 

“You’d fuck your back I think, given your old age.” Dan’s trying to lighten the mood, but he’s not very good at it. Because all he can think about is how this is his moment, the one he’d kept hoping for. The chance to actually invite Phil over for the night. But now it’s here it’s fucking terrifying, now it’s here there’s the possibility of Phil saying no and asking for the nearest hotel instead. 

The idea of Dan having properly read this all wrong is... crushing, honestly. It’s what he’s been clinging to lately, the idea that Phil feels the same. To have him turn around and stomp all over the thought is—Dan doesn’t even know. But he looks so worried, like he genuinely believes he’s going to have to sleep here overnight. 

“Phil.”

“Yeah?” He breaks out of the daze he’d been in, eyes leaving the announcement board. 

“Wanna stay at mine, then we can come back here tomorrow when it’s, hopefully, stopped raining?”

And Phil’s face is one Dan will always remember, one of pure fucking joy. Smile enough to light a small village, the village being this one.

“Please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, lemme know your thoughts. thanku all for being so lovely about this! <3


	4. Chapter 4

Dan’s flat seems bare compared to the house they’ve been spending so much of their time in. He almost wants to apologise for the lack of—anything. He’s never fully settled here, never gone all out and built this place into a home. And maybe that’s why it feels so temporary, because he’s making it so. Or maybe he’s just waiting for someone to build a home with, someone to help him fill up all the empty space. 

And it’s not a surprise that his mind goes straight to Phil. Because Phil has been living in his head rent free for weeks now, it only makes sense he actually move in. 

“It’s cozy in here.” Phil comments, finger buried deep in the fluffy blanket Dan has chucked over the back of the sofa. And Dan had been stupid to think Phil would judge, because he never has. Always just accepted everything face on. “Can I sleep with the bear?”

“The—the what?”

“This!” He wiggles the blanket. “It’s so fluffy and like a soft bear, I think. You know how like you are told to not interact with bears in the wild, but you want to cos they’re like… friend shaped? This blanket is how I imagine they would feel.”

“Where the fuck are you seeing bears?” Dan asks. “We’re in England.”

Phil just frowns, ignores the question. And he’s good at doing that, ignoring Dan and his actual logical points. Or ignoring Dan when he says something he doesn’t want to hear. Or ignoring Dan when he’s being annoying. He just sort of skips right over the subject, starts something new. It’s as frustrating as it is funny, because Dan genuinely sometimes wants to discuss whatever subject is being blanked. 

“Do you think it’ll stop by morning?”

“Maybe. I Dunno. Check the weather app thingy.” Dan would, but he’s distracted. 

Distracted by how unterrified he feels about having someone in his home, how this all feels right in a way that it probably shouldn’t. They’re not even really anything, beyond whatever Dan has imagined in his head, but it still fits. Phil looks like he belongs here.

“You know, when I was a kid I wanted to be a weather person so bad.” 

Dan laughs, but he can imagine it. He’s so full of energy, radiates all this joy. There’s something nice about the idea of tuning into morning TV, sat cross legged on the sofa with his cereal whilst he watches Phil present the weather.For now he’s just settled for watching his youtube videos on an awful loop. 

“Fun.” 

“I thought so, but then I realised you had to, like, find out the weather yourself. You didn’t just get told it in your ear.” Phil sounds upset about it, even now. Even though he’s got this huge career in something else. And it’s how Dan feels when he tries to explain his current job to someone. They hear anything to do with law and they think it’s impressive, think it’s worthwhile, and every time Dan feels like this complete imposter. Tricked his way into getting his degree, tricked his way into his current life. 

“You could make loads of shitty jokes about how you’re like the human version of the sun though.” Dan says, and that feels like too much. Like he just admitted something he hadn’t actually meant to. But then Phil smiles and Dan’s glad he spoke his stupid words out loud. 

“You could be my co-host, the sun and the… thundercloud?” 

“Thanks!” Dan laughs, jostling Phil away from the bear blanket because he definitely doesn’t deserve it now. 

“In a good way.” Phil whines, going all grabby. Dan’s got to fight off his hands a million times, but he eventually lets them settle on his arms when he realises it’s… nice. When his head tells him this is essentially like being held. “Like you’re exciting.” 

“And loud?”

“Yeah.” Phil agrees, but it doesn’t feel like an insult when he’s gently running his fingers along Dan’s forearms. “But in — good way. I love it.”

And it’s a moment, or it could be a moment. It’s just actual thunder happens then and Dan jumps out of his skin, out of Phil’s odd embrace. “Sorry. Not a fan.”

“Well now neither am I.” Phil sounds upset, or something close to being upset. More disappointed, maybe that’s more accurate. And Dan still can’t work it out, stupid unless there’s actual words involved. He needs Phil to say It all out loud so it’s no longer as terrifying. 

It’s easy to focus on the chance that Phil may not actually want this, whatever this is. Even though all the signs are there, even though they’ve been dancing around each other for weeks.He could probably lean in and confirm it all, but that’s too fucking much when he’s not one hundred percent certain. 

“You want food?” 

“I could go for food.” Phil nods, seemingly over the little moment he’d just been having. Back to being Dan’s friend. He abandons the idea of burrito-ing himself in the blanket to follow Dan through the flat, practically on his heels with every step. And it’s funny because Dan wants to tell Phil he won’t get lost, but he also wants to offer him a piggy back just to get that little bit closer. 

Phil sits at the table as Dan tries to fix them both up something that vaguely resembles a meal, it’s just he hasn’t been food shopping in a while and—that’s all. Not been shopping in a while. Doesn’t have enough ingredients for breakfast at this point. He feels bad about offering up a bowl of dry pasta, but Phil seems to just not care. More invested in asking Dan a million and one questions. 

“And you like the windows?”

“Yeah.” Dan nods, slowly. “I like my windows?”

“Do you not think you could have bigger windows?” 

“I could, but why would I… it’s not like, an option. The building is so old, it’s literally listed. I own the inside of this flat but I can’t start demanding they give me bigger windows.” But now Dan is imaging it, even though it’s impossible. He’s not living in a penthouse at the top of a skyscraper. This building is three floors, and at some point it was a literal church. “I have a stained glass window in my bedroom.”

“What?” Phil chokes on his dry pasta. “I want to see.” 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

“Oh my god.” Phil’s practically become one with it, hand spread out over the colours. “I love it.” 

“It’s… fun. Apart from when it’s like four fucking am and it starts like being so fucking bright you can’t sleep anymore.” Dan complains. “And surprisingly there aren’t a million options for stained glass window curtains.” 

“Just like put a sheet over it, you can’t complain when you have something this cool.” 

“Yeah, I’ll staple gun a sheet to my literal wall.” And if Dan treats this all like a game—something funny—maybe then he’ll stop thinking about how Phil is stood inside his bedroom. But standing in someone’s room doesn’t even have to mean anything, most of the time it doesn’t, but right now Dan wants it to. Dan wants it to be something. 

“I wouldn’t—stop being pedantic.” Phil screws up his face, but the multi-coloured light hitting his skin is so beautiful that Dan almost forgets how to breathe for a second. 

“Big word.” He gets out, eventually. 

“English language degree comes in clutch.”

“Comes in clutch?” Dan laughs. “Jesus. Now you should stop saying words.”

And it’s nice, to have this. To laugh with someone who actually wants to listen to

him. It’s not that awful thing of knowing someone wishes they were literally anywhere else, laughing just to avoid it all turning awkward. Forced laughter is all Dan seems to get here, it’d be good—for him—to get something genuine. To get Phil wrapped up in a neat little bow and on his doorstep. But life doesn’t work like that, and it’d be unfair to even want it to. Phil had a life of his own, can’t drop it just to come and sit with Dan every night and make him feel—things. 

“You slagging me off?” Phil asks, but he’s closer now. Moved with Dan even realising it, too deep in his own little dreamscape. “What else do you hate about me? Want a list.”

“Weird.” Dan says. “Gotta degradation thing going on.”

“No!” Phil yelps, but then—“I dunno, maybe. Try it.”

And Dan would love to try it, but he can’t really think of anything right now. Not with Phil stood so close, not when he looks so goddamn perfect. In this very moment all he hates is the fact he can’t fucking have him.

“Erm... your hair is flat.”

“It isn’t.” Phil reaches up to try and prove Dan wrong, but his hand lands in all this wet flat hair. “Ok, fine it is.”

“Want to borrow my shower?”

“Please, yeah.”

So Phil showers and Dan tries to work out exactly how tonight is going to go down. The sofa in his living room is about half the size of Phil, but there’s no guest room. That just leaves one half of his double bed, which is... god. Horrible to think about. Dan’s been able to control his own mouth up to now, sort of, and having Phil right beside him like that would probably ruin it. 

But Phil can’t sleep on the sofa, and Dan won’t sleep on the sofa because the last time he did that he felt like he had a broken neck for three days. 

So it’s bed. 

But maybe it’s a bed with a wall of pillows in the middle. 

“Boo.” Phil manages to make Dan jump, for once, after weeks of attempts and all it took was Dan having a mini crisis over sleeping arrangements. 

“Oh fuck you.” Dan presses a hand to his hammering heartbeat, then he makes Phil do the same. “Heartattack.”

“Dunno.” Phil says, his hand staying in place, all this warmth seeping through the thin material of Dan’s shirt. “Think you might survive.”

But he’s not surviving. Because Phil’s all wrapped up in Dan’s pyjamas, looking for all the world like he belongs here. And now Dan wants to be selfish, wants to prod and poke and _convince_. Convince Phil here could be good for him, Dan could be good for him. 

“What?” Phil asks, softly. And it becomes apparent that Dan’s just been staring at him, completely and utterly lost in everything Phil is. 

“Sorry. Daydreaming.” Dan takes a step back, and then another and then—he smashes into his own doorframe. “Shower. Going to have a shower.”

So Dan stands under the spray and then he makes the mistake of imagining Phil stood under it. And that leads to a shower that’s a bit too long, leads to this weird feeling of guilt when he comes out to find Phil tucked all cozy into the corner of his sofa. 

“Hi.” He smiles, ruffling at his own wet curls because he really isn’t in the mood tonight for the whole dry and style routine. “You ok?”

“Yeah.” 

“Okay.” Dan feels awkward, caught out even though he’d been quiet. Bitten down on his right fist when he’d spilled out over the left. “You good to sleep in... like my bed?”

“Oh.” Phil blinks up at him. “I’m not sleeping on here?”

“Only if you want to wake up with a broken neck and all your bones in the wrong place.”

“Ok.” Phil smiles. “Your bed sounds good, just means I can pretend I’m in a movie in the morning when all the light starts coming in from that window.”

“It’s actually really fucking annoying.” And it’s less awkward now, so Dan doesn’t think twice about sitting down beside him. He feels too wound up to try and sleep, instead suggests they watch a film or something. Anything. 

They end up on Mario kart, which—awful idea. Because Dan’s good, and Phil is alright but... not amazing. Not Dan level. And that just results in accusations, in Phil trying to block the screen which his stupid long armed wingspan. Any ounce of sleep that had once been inside of Dan is knocked right out of him when he has to start wrestling Phil for the control. 

“Stop biting it! You fucker.” He’s got his hands seemingly everywhere at once, but he can’t get the control of Phil who looks—evil. Phil looks evil and he definitely knows he’s being evil. 

“What’s the magic word?” Phil asks.

“Fucker.”

“Nope.” Phil pops the P, and Dan only wants to strangle him a _little_ bit. “Try again.”

“Give.”

“No.”

“Ugh.” Dan relents. “Please can I have _my_ controller back?”

“You may.” Phil drops it into Dan’s hand. And the eye contact is so fucking much. 

“Bed?” Dan suggests. “We should go to bed.”

“Alright.” And the sigh from earlier is back. “Bed.”

⌂ ⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

Dan cannot sleep, and apparently Phil can’t either. He keeps tossing and turning, making noises of discontent that are definitely supposed to be heard—probably supposed to be acknowledged. 

“Phil.” He whispers. 

“Yeah?” The response is immediate, which means he’d been waiting for this. For the start of a conversation that probably should’ve already happened. Would’ve happened if Dan were braver. 

“You ok? You’re all wriggly.”

“Hmpfff.”

“Cool noise.” Dan laughs, rolling over onto his side to assess. To see exactly what Phil’s got to whine about. “You’ve literally got more than half the bed, you can’t be complaining about not being comfy.”

“I’m not.” Phil rolls over too, and it’s just the both of them starting at each other in the darkness. “It’s not that.”

“No?” Dan’s heart rate picks up, going all wild in his chest. “Then what?”

“Dan.” He pleads, and his eyes are so bright even now. 

“Yeah.” Dan answers, an answer to a question that hadn’t even been spoken out loud. “Whatever you want, Phil, yeah.”

And he desperately hopes he’s gotten it all right. That Phil wants him, not just another pillow—a blanket from the cupboard in the hall because he’s too cold. But then there’s a hand cupping his jaw, thumb stroking over his cheekbone in silent request. All Dan can do is swallow too loudly, nod and hope that’s enough. 

It’s enough. Phil tilts his head but the angle he leans in at still isn’t right, they still bump noses and they still have a two second giggle before their lips actually touch. And when they do it’s—god. It’s new, but it doesn’t feel that way. Feels as though they’ve been doing it for years. It’s soft and tender, then it’s Phil getting grabby, pulling Dan closer. 

It lasts for a minute. Or an hour. Dan really couldn’t tell you. He just knows it’s happened, finally. And when they break apart he’s grinning like an idiot, then he’s pulling Phil back again because if he’s allowed then he’a going to make the most of this. The time he has wherein Phil is actually here, not back off in London living a completely separate life. 

“Dan.” Phil’s the one to talk, to break whatever moment they’d been living in. “I like you, so much. I’m not—god. I’m not like looking for a one night stand here.”

“Same.” Dan rushes to answer, because he needs Phil to know he means it. “Fuck. All I’ve done lately is think about you.”

“Yeah?” Phil asks, tucking one of Dan’s barely dried curls behind his ear. “Was hoping you’d get the hint, that I’m not really that passionate about cleaning up houses.”

“I just thought you were passionate about visiting farms.” Dan laughs, and Phil swoops in again and cuts off the noise. 

They kiss for too long, until they’re both wound up and aren’t sure how far they’re allowed to push. Dan’s been grinding down into Phil’s hip without even realising, only notices when Phil stills him with a hand. “Can I touch you?”

“Yeah.” Dan’s not even trying to act like he’s anything less than desperate. “I don’t have, like, the stuff though.”

“Like the stuff?” 

“Condoms. I literally never meet anyone so I always forget to buy them, because it’s not like I’m getting fucked on the regular and—“ Phil cuts him off effectively, a palm pressed against the front of his pyjama bottoms. 

“I said I just want to touch you.” Phil says, voice low. “Not fuck you, not right now anyway.”

“Ok—that’s, yeah. Hands are good.”

“Hands are good.” Phil agrees, laughing until he’s not, because Dan’s getting needy now. Rocking up against Phil’s thigh until he gets the hint. 

It’s a quick thing, despite Dan having gotten himself off in the shower literally two hours before. It’s just—Phil’s clever fingers and dirty words whispered right into Dan’s ear. He’s teeth against Dan’s neck, figuring out just how sensitive Dan is without being told. 

And Dan’s a mess. He’s noisy and he grabs hold of Phil and fucks into his fist, doesn’t care how he looks because it’s just been so long. 

“God.” Phil sounds halfway to wrecked even though Dan hasn’t done a thing. “Gonna get off from the noises you make.” 

“Don’t. Wanna touch you, I wanna—fuck.” Dan whines, and when Phil changes up the rhythm to something with _meaning_ it doesn’t take long at all. He bites down as he comes, leaves teeth marks on Phil’s shoulder as a reminder.

It takes him a minute to come back down to earth, for his heart to stop beating out of his chest. And when he rolls over Phil looks awfully smug, and it’s miraculous he’s managing to pull it off with a fistful of come. “Good?”

“Shutup.” Dan laughs, burying his face in his hands. “There’s tissue on the bedside table next to you.”

“What if I want you to lick it off?”

“God.” Dan breathes. “Do you.”

“No.”

“Idiot.”

“Yeah.” Phil agrees. “An idiot who just made you like astral project.” 

“Roll over.” Dan demands. 

“Why?” 

“Because I have good hands too.”

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

Dan wakes up first, and he has to get up and check the bin or evidence that last night was actually real. That he didn’t get overly eager in his wet dreams. There are tissues in there. And there’s a Phil still in his bed. He looks dead to the world, and Dan doesn’t want to wake him up but he knows he has to. 

Knows they have to go back and finish that house today. And then—then what? Then Phil goes back home and they’ll try the distance thing, but it won’t work. It won’t work even if there’s only an hour of time between them, because Dan knows what he’s like. 

But for now, for now, he’s going to let himself enjoy this. Bask in the knowledge  that it wasn’t this one sided thing, that Phil had actually wanted him all along. And despite his brain trying so hard to convince him he won't try, he’ll _still_ try. He'll try when Phil has to leave, because he wants to this enough to _try._

“Stop creeping on me.” Phil grins, cracking one eye open just to fully catch Dan out. 

“I’m allowed.” Dan argues, leaving behind his weirdo bin search to go flop down onto the mattress. “Made you cum.”

“Ugh.” Phil says, but he’s giggling so he probably doesn’t mean it in a—certain way. “You did, god, you really fucking did. Think I’m still in recovery.”

“Sooo...” Dan wriggles about until he can get to where he wants to be, chin digging in to Phil’s chest, an arm wrapped around his waist. “You don’t want to go again?”

“Can you not put words into my mouth?”

“Just other things?” Dan asks. 

“Just other things.”

Twenty minutes later and there’s more tissue in the bin. 

“That’s more sex than I’ve had like... can’t even remember.” Phil’s holding him close, like they have nowhere else to be today. And Dan wishes that they could stay wrapped up in the moment, but the auction is next week and if the house is still in some need of some sorting. “My dick is actually confused I think.”

“Yeah? Were you storing up all your cum for the winter? Some hibernation.”

Phil does _not_ enjoy that sentence, Dan’s never been called an _evil little boy_ before but—first time for everything. 

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

There are pigs in the field today, but not really in the field. They’re sort of far back, but Phil demands they hop the fence to go and have a look. Apparently him Bill are best friends now and he’ll _understand_. 

“We have to go clean out the house at some point today.”

“I know.” Phil says, but he does not make an attempt to stand. “I’m just playing.”

“Like a pig in shit?”

“I just—London doesn’t have this.” Phil sighs. “That’s all.”

Dan feels all wobbly at that, another reminder that by the end of today Phil’s going to have no reason to stick around. Unless he decides Dan is a big enough reason. 

“You can come visit, can’t you?” And it’s a plea disguised as a question.

“Obviously I’m going to come visit, Dan.” Phil bats around in thin air until Dan gets the hint and takes ahold of his hand. “For more than the fluffy cows.”

“Ok.” Dan smiles. “I’d like that. And, you know, I can come see you in London.” Dan wants Phil to know he’s just as invested in this, that not everything is on him. 

Phil gets to his feet with a grunt, nearly drags Dan down into the dirt because apparently _walking is hard and mud is sticky._ “I’d like that too, Dan.”

The downstairs of the house is filled with bin bags, all the boxes had already ended up at the charity shop after one too many tripping over incidents. They’d found a lot of stuff that was too good to chuck, thought it could find a good home somewhere else. Phil’s clung onto a few things, that’s all in a borrowed suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. 

“Just the bedroom then?” Phil asks, and they’d have gotten upstairs a while ago but kissing in the murder hallway had seemed like a really fun idea. 

“Seems to be the bedroom, yeah, unless there’s a secret room we don’t know about.”

“How cool would that be?” Phil seems excited about the prospect, grabs Dan’s hand to drag him up the stairs and start a search. “We have to like lift a few floorboards.”

“You realise that doesn’t make sense? There’s not a secret room in the floor.” But Dan can’t sound mean when he’s physically incapable of looking away from the intertwined fingers.

“Have some imagination, Daniel.”

“Daniel? Alright, sorry.”

“I’m scared.” Phil says. “Like—what if I get to the bedroom and whatever is in there is really horrible? Or sad? Or both?”

“But you know you’d hate yourself if you never looked.” Dan pauses outside the door, just so he can kiss him again—hopes it offers at least a bit of reassurance. “And you’ve got me with you, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Phil nods. “I’ve got you.”

There’s nothing evil in the bedroom, or horrible. But there is sad. There are photographs of a married couple who never actually got the chance to wed. A ceremony that was never official in the eye of the law, but was clearly official to them. 

It was _their_ enough.

“God.” Dan’s not going to cry. “That’s fucking—if your aunts partner had lived a year longer then they could’ve actually have gotten married.”

“Yeah.” Phil’s fingers are brushing over the black and white image, like he’s trying to imagine himself having been there. “Do you think my aunt died of heartbreak? That all the stuff here was hers and she couldn’t get rid of it?”

Dan rests his chin on Phil’s shoulder, wraps an arm around his waist. He just wants to offer everything he can today, support him in all of this. “I think they were real happy, Phil, they look it.”

“They do.” Phil agrees. “I wish I’d have gotten to know them properly. I don’t know, maybe then I would’ve felt differently. Said stuff sooner.”

“She’d have been proud of you, probably watched your coming out video and was like oh yeah... giving him everything.” 

“See. I was right!” Phil laughs. “She left me everything cos I’m the other gay one in the family.”

“Gay inheritance.”

“Exactly.”

They dig around a bit longer, box up the important things and Dan agrees to store them in his flat until Phil can take them home. There’s enough photos to fill an entire gallery, and enough letters to fill a million books. 

“God. They were properly in love, weren’t they?” Dan catches a glimpse of writing, of language that only the in love could use. “Still wanna know why they had a murder hallway.”

“Halloween.”

“What?”

“Halloween.” Phil repeats. He’s sat cross-legged on the floor, a letter on his lap that doesn’t make any sense because he’d promised to himself that he’d never open one. “She wrote me something, saw my name on one of the envelopes.” 

“Oh?” Dan leaves everything he’d been doing on the nearest surface, joins Phil on the ground. “What’d it s—actually no. You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, it’s fine.” Phil doesn’t hand it over, nor does he read it all, just picks out the parts he thinks are important. “She said the hallway was Halloween, used to really dress everything up for the kids in the village, but then she got to sick to take it all down so it just stayed all year.”

“Ah.” And now Dan feels guilty, for the little bit of judgement—for all the murder ideas. “That’s cute. I wish I’d have grown up here and gotten sweets of the lesbians.”

Phil laughs, and the eye roll can be seen from a mile off. “I’m gay, I’ll give you sweets.”

“Does your cock count as a sweet?”

“Da-an.” Phil whines. “But yes.”

“Think we’re both evil.”

“Maybe.” Phil shrugs. “Also... I wish I’d have found this letter ages ago.”

“Why?”

“Cos the p.s is about how she’s left her will with the handsome gay man, who she thinks will be just my type.”

⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂⌂

Phil goes home. They kiss at the train station. But Phil still goes home, because he has to go home and Dan knows that. It still leaves him feeling a bit achy though. Part of him had been hoping for another night, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. 

**Phil:** miss u immediately 

**Dan:** u can always take over the train and turn it back around 

**Phil:** don’t think that’s how trains work 

**Dan:** logic is boring sometimes

**Phil:** are we still doing the gavel thingy?

**Dan:** auction?

**Phil:** yeeeee

**Dan:** Next week

**Phil:** then I’ll see you next week?

**Dan:** that’s so long

**Phil:** I know :( just got some things to sort out back here 

They text everyday but it’s not the same as Phil being here. As hearing him traipse up the gravel path with his big elephant feet. He’s gotten hopeful a couple of times, turned to look out the window only to see it’s definitely someone who’s not Phil. 

The week drags, but he still wants it to go on for a little while longer. Because when Phil comes here and sells the house then that really is it. Apart from he’s telling himself to stop thinking like that, that an hour on a train really isn’t anything at all. And he’s going to fucking try, he’s going to give this his all because it’s Phil. Because Phil’s made him feel more than anyone else ever has, and he can’t give that up because of a few rules his brain made up years ago.

Sometimes rules that you make up to protect yourself end up doing the opposite, and Dan’s going to try and break that habit before it destroys something good. In an ideal world things would be different, but life doesn’t work like that and Dan’s finally starting to realise that not everything has to be perfect. That things can just be ok, things can make him _happy_ , and that’s enough. 

And Phil makes him more than happy, plus Phil has already told him this means more than just a quickie illuminated by the light from a stained glass window. Phil’s made his stance clear, and Dan trusts him— all he needs to do it start trusting himself. 

The day Dan’s been secretly trying to ward off comes around quickly, and Phil’s feet are back on the gravel and his pretty face inside Dan’s office.

“Hi.” It’s awkward for a second, until Phil’s sat on his desk like he always does. Apart from this time he’s kissing Dan, and Dan’s pulling him down into his lap without a second thought. 

“Nice hello.” Dan smiles. “Miss me that much?”

“Yeah.” Phil answers, not even trying to pretend he hasn’t. And it’s nice, all the sincerity that he gives. “A lot. Nearly got the train up like three times.”

“But now you’re here. “

“Now you’re here.”

They don’t fuck in Dan’s office, but Dan does add it to his bucket list. They leave hand in hand, and neither of them can wipe the smile off their face. Dan really hopes this isn’t it, that there’s more to their story. 

But when the gavel goes down it feels fucking—awful. Even after all Dan’s thought sorting, even after convincing himself of everything being fine. For just a second the noise feels like an ending, even if Phil’s still holding his hand. Even if he goes back with Dan afterwards to celebrate. 

It feels like the end until it feels like a beginning, until Phil walks into his flat and never seems to properly leave it again. A day here and there, but Dan knows he'll always be back and it'll always be signalled by those feet on the gravel. 

Phil just settles into Dan's life with an ease that shouldn't even be real. And there's a silent agreement to it all, it's just something they both get - both _want._ Dan says nothing about how every time Phil travels to London he comes back with another bag full of things, until eventually there's nothing left to bring. Doesn't say anything when the here and there days become less, and he doesn't say anything when those days cease to exist at all.

And even if all of that weren't the case, even if Phil’s _sorting stuff out_ hadn’t meant working out a way to move out of London, Dan’s sure it still wouldn’t have been the end. 

Dan’s sure that their story was always supposed to be longer than a few weeks, that it was always supposed to be an entire lifetime. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [If u want to reblog on tumblr I always appreciate it!](https://fictropes.tumblr.com/post/644297790485299200/inheriting-love-now-complete-44-m-21959)
> 
> :D Thanku everyone who came along with me and was so nice about my whacky little concept! I hope you enjoyed this chapter! as always lemme know your thoughts<3!

**Author's Note:**

> as always lemme know ur thouuuuughhhhts <3\. this will be another 3 parter! :D


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